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Vol. 24, No. 1, 2025
 
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EDUCATION IN DARK TIMES


by
HENRY A. GIROUX

__________________________________________

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth and Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism. Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear on his website at www.henryagiroux.com. His interview with Bill Moyers is must viewing. He was recently named one of the century's 50 most significant contributors to the debate on education.

You should not honour men more than truth.
Plato

In the current historical moment, education cannot surrender to the call of academics who now claim in the age of Trump that there is no room for politics in the classroom, or the increasing claim by administrators that universities have a responsibility to remain neutral. This position is not only deeply flawed but also complicit in its silence over the current far right politicization of education.

The call for neutrality in many North American universities is a retreat from social and moral responsibility, masking the reality that these institutions are deeply embedded in power relations. As Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash and Priya Gupta aptly argue, neutrality “serves to flatten politics and silence scholarly debate,” obscuring the inherently political nature of university life. From decisions about enrollment and research funding to event policies and poster placements, every administrative choice reflects a political stance. Far from apolitical, neutrality is a tool that silences dissent and shields power from accountability.

It is worth repeating that the most powerful forms of education today extend far beyond public and higher education. With the rise of new technologies, power structures and social media, culture itself has become a tool of propaganda. Right-wing media, conservative foundations, and a culture dominated by violence and reality TV created the fertile ground for the rise of Trump and his continued legitimacy. Propaganda machines like Fox News have fostered an anti-intellectual climate, normalizing Trump’s bigotry, lies, racism and history of abuse. This is not just a political failure — it is an educational crisis.

In the age of new media, platforms like Elon Musk’s X and tech giants like Facebook, Netflix and Google have become powerful teaching machines, actively serving the far right and promoting the values of gangster capitalism. These companies are reshaping education, turning it into a training ground for workers who align with their entrepreneurial vision or, even more dangerously, perpetuating a theocratic, ultra-nationalist agenda that views people of color and marginalized groups as threats. This vision of education must be rejected in the strongest terms, for it erodes both democracy and the very purpose of education itself.

Education, in its truest sense, must be about more than training students to be workers or indoctrinating them into a white Christian nationalist view of who does and doesn’t count as American. Education should foster intellectual rigor and critical thinking, empowering students to interrogate their experiences and aspirations while equipping them with the agency to act with informed judgment. It must be a bold and supportive space where student voices are valued and engaged with pressing social and political issues, cultivating a commitment to justice, equality and freedom. In too many classrooms in the U.S., there are efforts to make students voiceless, which amounts to making them powerless. This must be challenged and avoided at all times.

Critical pedagogy must expose the false equivalence of capitalism and democracy, emphasizing that resisting fascism requires challenging capitalism. To be transformative, it should embrace anti-capitalist principles, champion radical democracy and envision political alternatives beyond conventional ideologies.

In the face of growing attacks on higher education, educators must reclaim their role in shaping futures, advancing a vision of education as integral to the struggle for democracy. This vision rejects the neoliberal framing of education as a private investment and instead embraces a critical pedagogy as a practice of freedom that disrupts complacency, fosters critical engagement, and empowers students to confront the forces shaping their lives.

In an age of resurgent fascism, education must do more than defend reason and critical judgment — it must also mobilize widespread, organized collective resistance. A number of youth movements, from Black Lives Matter and the Sunrise Movement to Fridays for Future and March for Our Lives, are mobilizing in this direction. The challenge here is to bring these movements together into one multiracial, working-class organization.

The struggle for a radical democracy must be anchored in the complexities of our time — not as a fleeting sentiment but as an active, transformative project. Democracy is not simply voting, nor is it the sum of capitalist values and market relations. It is an ideal and promise — a vision of a future that does not imitate the present; it is the lifeblood of resistance, struggle, and the ongoing merging of justice, ethics and freedom.

In a society where democracy is under siege, educators must recognize that alternative futures are not only possible but that acting on this belief is essential to achieving social change.

The global rise of fascism casts a long shadow, marked by state violence, silenced dissent and the assault on critical thought. Yet history is not a closed book — it is a call to action, a space for possibility. Now, more than ever, we must dare to think boldly, act courageously, and forge the democratic futures that justice demands and humanity deserves.

By Henry Giroux:

Childcide in Fascist Theocracies
The Corporate Firewall Against Truth

Assassins of Memory

Not Joe's But Our Collective Memory Issues

The Politics of Emergency Time
Hijacking Freedoms
America at the Crossroads
Gangster Capitalism
Historical Amnesia in Age of Capitalist Apocalypse
The Inequality of Freedom
The Nazification of Education
Killing Fields in Age of Mass Shootings
The Pedagogy of Resistance
The Death of Ethics
Banning Books
Homage to Paulo Freire
Plague of Manufactured Ignorance
Racial Cleansing and Erasing History
Plague of Historical Amnesia
Recovering from Trumpism
Tribute to Noam Chomsky
The Ouster of Trump
White Supremacy in the Offal Office
The Plague of Inequity
Covid and our Embattled Society
Trump and the Corona Death Waltz
Neoliberal Fascism
The Terror Unforseen
Interview of H.A.Giroux
The Normalization of Fascism
The Public Intellectual II
Bertrand Russell: Public Intellectual
Thinking Dangerously in Dark Times
Democracy in Exile
Authoritarianism in America
Violence: US Favourite Pastime
Losing in Trump's America
In Dark Times Teachers Matter
The Age of Civic Illiteracy
Exile and Disruption in the Academy
What Society Produces a Donald Trump
From School to the Prison Pipeline
Orwell & Huxely
American Sniper and Hollywood Heroism
Selfie Culture
The Age of Disposability
In the Shadow of the Atomic Bomb
Killing Machines and the Madness of the Military
The Age of Neoliberal Cruelty
The Politics of the Deep State
Challenging Casino Capitalism
Crisis in Democracy
America's Descent into Madness

 

 

 

 

 

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