Monday 16 May 2011 by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout
With all due respect to Charles Dickens, it appears to be the worst of times for public and higher education in America, if not democracy itself; public schools are increasingly viewed as a business and are prized above all for customer satisfaction and efficiency, while largely judged through the narrow lens of empirical accountability measures. When not functioning as an adjunct of corporate value or a potentially lucrative for-profit investment, public schools are reduced to containment centers, holding institutions designed to largely punish young people marginalized by race and class.
No longer merely tracked into low achieving classes, poor white, brown and black youth are now tracked out of school into what is often called the school-to-prison pipeline. Many schools have now become stress centers for the privileged and zones of abandonment for the poor. Public schoolteachers are now viewed as the new "welfare- queens," while academics are defined less as critical intellectuals and engaged scholars than as a new class or professional entrepreneurs, or worse, simply as low-level technicians reduced to teaching students how to take tests and master work-related skills. At the same time, under strict policies imposed in a number of states by right-wing politicians wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of austerity, higher education at all levels is being radically defunded, while simultaneously being transformed into a credentializing factory restructured according to the values, social relations and governing practices of large corporations. In both public and higher education, ignorance is not merely fostered but embraced through course content, the value of which is almost exclusively defined through a debasing standard in which anything that can't be quantified is defined as useless. Corporate pedagogy has no use for critical thinking, autonomous subjects, the stretching of the imagination or developing a sense of civic responsibility among students. Teachers who think and act reflectively, ask uncomfortable questions, challenge the scripts of official power and promote a search for the truth while encouraging pedagogy as the practice of freedom, are now viewed as suspect, if not un-American.
Full at: http://www.truthout.org/american-democracy-beyond-casino-capitalism-and-torture-state/1305143581