HENRY A. GIROUX*
Disposable Futures, Dirty Democracy, and the Politics of Higher Education
As of late, I have been reading Michele Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish. I have been perplexed at how relevant Foucault’s writing is to modern society. I was so exhilarated to learn of someone who is applying this theory to the modern context and to critical pedagogy, so I will just highlight a few ways in which Giroux’s views are built on Foucault’s writing.
Giroux described Neoliberalism as representing a system of cruelty that reaches from educational policy to the practices of empire, rendering power invisible. The idea that power is everywhere but is nowhere to be found or that power is “removed from the public view” is referential to Foulcoult’s theory of panopticism. Foucoult’s ideas are referred to by Giroux further when he discussed that under neolibralism, punishment is favored over rehabilitation such as in zero tolerance programs where schools are modeled after prisons. For example Giroux stated that ‘schools are becoming militarized’ and ‘drug sniffing dogs, security, survaillence and police are employed to disclipline youth.
Giroux also discussed the idea that under neolibralism, the local community is being left in the wake due to such a strong emphasis being based on either the individual or state / corporate power. Giroux uses the example of the abolishment of community in the acknowledging the trend that public storytelling is being eroded. This notion is also rooted in Foucault who states in Disclipline and Punish, “the crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities” (Foucault, 1979, p. 201).
On another note I will add to Carolyn’s words on “ in case there was any doubt….” about the corporatization of education in New Brunswick. The chancellor at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick also happens to be the CEO of a communications provider, East Link. Students at Mount Allison have no choice but to buy into a ‘bundle’ of phone, internet and cable TV. Students cannot buy into only one or two options of either phone, internet or TV and they can not buy from another provider. Talk about using media to maintain a power dynamic!
I have heard that UBC is taking away water fountains because Coca Cola is not making enough money at their vending machines.
See: http://www.insidethebottle.org/student-action-bottled-water-industry-marketing-ruse
AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
HENRY A. GIROUX*
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
To add to the thinking on the panopticon and schooling, it's worth noting that the American mass education system was modeled, by Horace Mann, after the Prussian school system - as militaristic a regime as ever existed. There's a great Harper's Magazine article called Against School by John Taylor Gatto that's well worth reading. In this article he writes:
"Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
"1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.
"Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
"The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable.""
Chris,
I'm curious as to where the small, one-room schoolhouse fits into this. The multi-aged, short-day, one-room community schoolhouse that brought siblings from different community families together seemed a far cry from the proposed intention of the Prussian system. Granted, the schooling methods were likely similar and most of these schoolhouses were abandoned in the late 1960s as transportation became cheaper and more efficient. Perhaps they were the first step in separating the generations and creating a dependence on force-fed answers.
Or perhaps they were part of the general evolution of society towards less land-based activity and community centred around more urban institutions (as the school system became more centralized in larger and larger towns).
Carolyn
I wonder just what the numbers of such schools were. And does our "memory" of them overestimate? For surely there is a lot of romanticist cache in the image of such an education. I have heard tell of efforts in early industrial England by working class communities who started their own schools with the knowledge that the subsequent generations would need an education controlled by the community if they were to resist the inexorable co-optation into the then-emerging industrial capitalist society. I heard that these schools were eliminated by state-supported mass-education. If anyone knows of what i speak i'd love some references or perhaps, at least, that i am spreading romantic nostalgia that never was.
I know that the New Brunswick countryside is littered with these old schoolhouses that were often sold by the NB government for $1 to other community groups in 1968 when NB went for more centralized approach. It ended up not really being that much of a deal since it left maintenance costs up to volunteers. The schools can be found in every little 20-household community. They were, however, still state supported and run from the beginning, presumably following a provincial curriculum.
As for the schools in England, I don't know much about that.... they weren't related to the Free School movement were they?
Post a Comment