You
should not honour men more than truth.
Plato
We are living
through a dismal age, one where anti-intellectualism
is no longer masked, but paraded as a form of virtue.
A fascist monoculture thrives, dull and mechanized,
overrun by wooden stuntmen, empathy-hating billionaires,
and artists like Kanye West who unashamedly praise Hitler.
Meanwhile, podcast ventriloquists spew algorithmic bile
into the void. In the ruins of the university, too many
so-called leaders and their bureaucratic accountants
now lend legitimacy to what Marcuse once called "scholarshit",
a travesty of thought, dressed in the empty rituals
of managerial reason, budget-cutting cruelty, and unapologetic
brutality. Never has the need for critical education
and a shift in mass consciousness been more urgent.
Never has it been more crucial to recognize education
as both a force for empowerment and a powerful mode
of colonization.
In an age
when instrumentalism dominates, reducing education to
mere training and suffocating pedagogy under the weight
of indoctrination, it becomes more urgent than ever
to reclaim the university as a space for reflection,
critique, and ethical imagination. Instrumentalism erases
social responsibility, dismisses matters of justice,
and detaches learning from the deeper relations of power.
It exchanges depth for compliance and, in the process,
robs education of its emancipatory promise.
We have
witnessed this logic unfold in so-called liberal movements
like "teaching to the test" and in the ongoing
proliferation of Teaching and Learning Centers, which
often reduce education to a toolbox of technical skills.
As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay warns, these practices
resemble the workings of "imperial technologies",
systems designed to manage learning without nurturing
an awareness of injustice, to flatten thought, and to
detach education from the struggle for democratic agency
and pedagogical citizenship.
Consider
Elon Musk, hailed by some as a visionary for creating
Tesla and fueling fantasies of colonizing Mars. Yet
beneath this gleaming myth lies a far more disturbing
reality. Musk has made Nazi salutes, trafficked in dangerous
conspiracy theories, and, as Michelle Goldberg noted
in The New York Times, exhibits a chilling
disdain for empathy, paired with "breathless cruelty."
This cruelty is not abstract; it manifests in the real
world, where the policies Musk champions have contributed
to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in
Africa. His power is not merely technological; it is
ideological, shaping a culture that confuses megalomania
with genius and elevates indifference to suffering as
a mark of strength. This is more than a collapse of
civic literacy, it is a toxic poison, destroying any
vestige of civic consciousness, solidarity, and social
responsibility.
Cruelty
has become the currency of power, the measure by which
dominance is asserted and human worth discarded. Bill
Gates, in a moment of moral clarity, acknowledged the
gravity of shuttering USAID, conceding that he “bore
the responsibility of risking a resurgence of diseases
such as measles, HIV, and polio.” But his warning
grew even more damning when, in the Financial Times,
he described Elon Musk—once heralded as a symbol
of techno-utopian promise—as “the world’s
richest man killing the world’s poorest children.”
Yet even Gates understates the larger architecture of
violence at work. Trump’s so-called “beautiful
budget bill” is not merely a policy document—it
is a blueprint for social abandonment, a death sentence
rendered in the language of austerity. It slashes funding
for child nutrition programs, strips health care from
millions, and eviscerates what remains of the social
state. In its wake rises a machinery of disposability—a
punishing state that targets the poor, the vulnerable,
and people of color, turning the politics of governance
into a war zone where compassion is silenced and suffering
normalized. This is gangster capitalism on steroids--unleashed,
utterly devoid of any social responsibility and drunk
on its own greed, power, corruption, and fascist principles.
This silence
speaks to a deeper void in higher education. It is no
longer enough to champion STEM disciplines while starving
the liberal arts and humanities. It is not enough for
humanities students to dwell only in critique, disconnected
from the technological world around them. What we need
is a fusion of literacies, a pedagogy that teaches technical
competence without sacrificing moral imagination; a
pedagogy that nurtures civic literacy, historical awareness,
the capacity to think beyond disciplines, and the courage
to cross borders of culture, identity, and thought.
Language
itself has been hijacked, bent to the will of a colonizing
legacy steeped in hatred, disposability, genocide, and
a culture of unapologetic cruelty. Neo-Nazis march without
shame, white supremacists shape the conservative cultural
machinery, and racist policies are no longer whispered
but codified. Nazi salutes are back in fashion. Universities
are increasingly transformed into sites of indoctrination
and surveillance, more attuned to the logic of police
precincts than places of critical learning. Students
who dare to protest the genocidal assault on Palestinians
in Gaza are abducted, vilified, and silenced. The most
powerful white nationalist on the planet parades corruption
as a political virtue and deploys state terror as a
primary tool of governance. Solidarity is reconfigured
into communities of hate, while resistance to fascism
is rebranded as terrorism. Beneath these crimes against
humanity lies a culture hollowed out by the absence
of reason, moral clarity, and the capacity to hold power
accountable. The ghost of fascism has not merely returned;
it has taken up residence and been made ordinary.
The age
of lofty visions has been cast aside, discarded like
ideological refuse. Yet without such visions, rooted
in the hard labor and hopeful promise of democracy and
the critical function of education, we are left adrift.
In their place stand administrators who act as high-powered
accountants, students shaped by a culture of commodification
and conformity, and a precarious academic labor force
paid less than Wall-Mart greeters and clerks. Meanwhile,
racism, white nationalism, and Christian fundamentalism
gather momentum, extinguishing the flickering lights
that once illuminated the path toward a radical democracy.
When higher education no longer serves as a vessel for
ethical imagination and collective hope, it becomes
complicit in its own undoing, and with it, democracy
itself teeters on the edge.
As educators,
we must fight for a vision of higher education as both
sanctuary and catalyst, a place where democracy is not
only studied but enacted, where students are not trained
to be efficient machines, but cultivated into thinking,
feeling, and acting human beings. We need an education
in which a culture of questioning is not punished but
nurtured, where talking back is a civic virtue, and
where the pursuit of equity and justice is central to
the very purpose of teaching and learning. Such an education
must be grounded in the principles of civic literacy,
historical consciousness, and a systemic understanding
of power—one that connects private troubles to
public issues and expands the possibilities for individual
and collective agency.
This is
the foundation upon which a radical democracy must be
built, and it is the defining pedagogical task of our
time. If we fail in this responsibility, higher education
will surrender its role as a vital civic sphere—one
essential to producing the narratives, knowledge, and
capacities that sustain the promise of equality, justice,
freedom, and compassion. In abandoning that mission,
it will not merely falter; it will aid in its own unraveling.
If it fails, it will become complicit in its own unraveling.
And with it, democracy will edge ever closer to collapse.
Donald Trump
understands this. That is why he fears critical education.
That is why he wages war on it.
also by Henry Giroux
Education
in Dark Times
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
