NEOLIBERALISM’S WAR ON HIGHER EDUCATION

Henry A. Giroux Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 20143Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyI was a little disappointed by Henry A. Giroux’s most recent book, and I heartily recommend it.Let me explain.Henry A. Giroux is a working-class kid from the United States of America. He got into college on a basketball scholarship. He is probably the most prolific author among those educators that align themselves with what’s called “critical pedagogy.” He could justifiably claim the mantle of Paulo Freire. He holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. His curriculum vitae could pass for a small town’s telephone book. He is 70-years-old. He looks more than half but not quite three-quarters of his age. He looks like he’d still make a formidable point guard. He still has the spirit of a working- class kid from the United States of America.Giroux has plenty of detractors. He has the air of a self-promoter. He can be admired for his stage presence in any of the many performances he gives as a certified “public intellectual,” but his critics might label his performances no more than a few hyperbolic shorts of demagoguery. He can also be very, very funny.Education is not the objective pursuit and dissemination of value-free knowledge and it is certainly not or (rather ought not to be) an anaesthetizing and depoliticizing process in which marketable “skill sets” are dispensed to uncritical student “customers.”Most obviously, Henry A. Giroux can be dismissed as an “ideologue.” I know a number of educational administrators who would do and have done everything they could to squelch an invitation for him to speak on campus. They are afraid of him. Worse, I know an enormous number of educational administrators who have never even heard of him-a testament only to the vast gap between them and anything important going on in education and the academic world.I have been privileged to share some air with him at a number of public lectures and I have had the opportunity to speak with him briefly on occasion. He would not, I think, publicly or privately reject the labels that others attempt to stick on him. It’s not worth the trouble. He is, by choice, a very busy man. He will talk to any audience worth his time-at professional conferences, faculty meetings, trade union gatherings or any others with a spark of life and a sense of outrage. When he does talk, they will leave well served and all the better for the experience. He is political and he is political for the very reason that he can’t help it. None of us can.Giroux has no interest in creating a certified population of supine citizens, compliant consumers and efficient producers. He presses for critical education that is intended to emancipate people from the ideological constraints…From Henry Giroux’s perspective, education from pre-school to post-graduate studies is under attack. It is being eviscerated by the same forces that dominate the toxic wasteland of popular entertainment, the “school-to-prison pipeline” that siphons off discontent in the racialized urban American centres, that conduct perpetual foreign wars and that ruthlessly exploit people regardless of age, gender and colour.It is one of Henry Giroux’s mantras that education is not the objective pursuit and dissemination of value-free knowledge and it is certainly not or (rather ought not to be) an anaesthetizing and depoliticizing process in which marketable “skill sets” are dispensed to uncritical student “customers” who are desperate to find employment in postmodern economies where satisfying, secure and well-paying jobs are quickly disappearing where they have not already vanished.In the alternative, Giroux believes that the educational project is many things, but it is at least this: regardless of whether students are studying architecture or zoology, engineering, economics, ethics or English literature, there is always a moral and a political essence to the enterprise. …