Public Intellectuals And The Politics Of Education
In opposition to the corporatizing of everything educational, progressive educators need to define higher education as a resource vital to the democratic and civic life of the nation. At the heart of such a task is the challenge for academics, cultural workers, and labor organizers to join together and oppose the transformation of higher education into commercial spheres, to resist what Bill Readings has called a consumer oriented corporation more concerned about accounting than accountability. As Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, schools are one of the few public spaces left where students can learn the “skills for citizen participation and effective political action. And where there is no [such] institutions, there is no “citizenship” either.” Public and higher education may be one of the few sites left in which students can learn about the limits of commercial values, address what it means to learn the skills of social citizenship, and learn how to deepen and expand the possibilities of collective agency and democratic life.
Defending higher education as a vital public sphere is necessary to develop and nourish the proper balance between democratic public spheres and commercial power, between identities founded on democratic principles and identities steeped in forms of competitive, self-interested individualism that celebrate selfishness, profit making, and greed. This view suggests that higher education be defended through intellectual work that self-consciously recalls the tension between the democratic imperatives or possibilities of public institutions and their everyday realization within a society dominated by market principles.. If the university is to remain a site of critical thinking, collective work, and social struggle, public intellectuals need to expand its meaning and purpose. That is, they need to define higher education as a resource vital to the moral life of the nation, open to working people and communities whose resources, knowledge, and skills have often been viewed as marginal. The goal here is to redefine such knowledge and skills to more broadly reconstruct a tradition that links critical thought to collective action, human agency to social responsibility, and knowledge and power to a profound impatience with a status quo founded upon deep inequalities and injustices.
There is more at stake here than recognizing the limits and social costs of a neoliberal philosophy that reduces all relationships to the exchange of goods and money, there is also the responsibility on the part of critical intellectuals and other activists to rethink the nature of the public. There is also the need to address new forms of social citizenship and civic education that have a purchase on people’s everyday lives and struggles expressed through a wide range of institutions. I believe that academics and others bear an enormous responsibility in opposing neoliberalism by bringing democratic political culture back to life. Part of this challenge suggest creating new locations of struggle, vocabularies, and subject positions that allow people in a wide variety of public spheres to become more than they are now, to question what it is they have become within existing institutional and social formations, and “to give some thought to their experiences so that they can transform their relations of subordination and oppression.” In part this suggests resisting the attack on existing public spheres such as the schools while simultaneously creating new spaces in clubs, neighborhoods, bookstores, schools, and other places where dialogue and critical exchanges become possible.
By : Henry A. Giroux - Penn State University
Original Sources : www.revistapraxis.cl - Revista Praxis N° 1, Mayo de 2002
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