Critical Pedagogy in a Time of Fascist Tyranny

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to episode 116 of our podcast. My name is Chris McNutt. I'm a member of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project. Before we get started, I want to let you know this podcast is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Kevin Gannon, Susan Michelle Harrison, and e David Miller. Thank you for your ongoing support. You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. In this extensive episode, we'll be releasing the keynote address and q and a session from our first speaker speaker at Conference to Restore Humanity twenty twenty two, doctor Henry Giroux. Our conference, which took place earlier this week from July 25 to July 28, had a great showing, and we were all thrilled by the response to the format that embraced virtual first and allowed time for meaningful conversations. We are firm believers in a free public access to pedagogical tools necessary in enacting a human centered education system. And over the next week, we will be releasing almost everything that was presented at the conference, including keynotes, q and a's, and learning track materials. The best things in education should not be gatekept. That said, almost all of our conference fees go toward paying our faculty track leaders and keynote speakers. We believe in paying a competitive rate. And to be transparent, HRP used its organizational funds to cover what ticket sales could not. Therefore, if you value this keynote and these resources, your donation ensures that we can continue to host events just like this. Further, your donation highlights there's a need for these types of events, allowing us to secure partnerships and scholarships for greater ideas in the future. If every regular listener donated 25% of the $200 ticket price, $50, we could easily pay off multiple conferences to restore humanity. Visit humanrestorationproject.org/donate to help us out, and stay tuned to our website and social media for conference material releases next week. Although you'll hear the same words from Henry soon, I wanted to highlight this statement that he made. Quote, educators do more than create the conditions for critical thinking and nourishing a sense of hope for their students. They also need to responsibly assume the role of public intellectuals and border crossers within broader social contexts and be willing to share their ideas with other educators and the wider public by making use of new media technologies and a range of other cultural apparatuses, including those outlets that are willing to address critically a range of social problems, end quote. Please utilize these resources to plant the seeds of progressive education in your context. Each small step we take together has meaningful, profound change. Always feel free to reach out to Human Restoration Project if we can support or partner with you. What you're about to hear takes place in two parts. The first is a prerecorded thirty five minute speech, followed by a live one hour q and a. If you prefer to watch these sessions, they are released on our YouTube channel. Simply search Human Restoration Project. Thank you and enjoy.

Speaker 2 I'm very grateful to be here. I wanna thank Chris for inviting me. I I think this is an enormously important conference, and I'm hoping it'll make a difference given the the period in which we are now living, which, to say the very least, is very threatening and poses a danger to public education and higher education unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime as an educator. I I basically wanna just say that I I wanna take up a couple of issues here and just forecast them. One is I wanna talk about the state of society and the emerging authoritarianism that we now have to face in which education has become a prime target. That's absolutely crucial. Secondly, I I wanna talk about critical pedagogy and neoliberalism and the forces shaping education outside of simply fascism. Thirdly, I wanna talk about critical pedagogy, why I think it's basically important to understand and to begin to embrace in in these dark times. And finally, I'm just gonna offer some suggestions that I hopefully will be useful in really thinking about creating a new language for education that both invigorates its vision and provides the condition for people to be engaged, critical agents working collectively to engage in some form of resistance. The the talk is really critical pedagogy in a time of fascist tyranny, which I I I don't think is an overstatement. So let me begin. Across the globe, democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, certain financial institutions, higher education are under siege. The promise and ideals of democracy are receding as right wing extremists breed new life into a fascist past and undermine what I call the public imagination. Reinventing a sordid fascist legacy with its obsession with racial purity, white nationalism, and denial denial of civil liberties, white supremacists are once more on the move, subverting language, values, courage, vision, and critical consciousness. Education has increasingly become a tool of domination as right wing pedagogical apparatuses controlled by the entrepreneurs of hate attack workers, the the poor, people of color, refugees, undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ people, and others increasingly considered disposable. In the midst of an era when an older social order is crumbling and a new one is struggling to define itself, there emerges a time of confusion, danger, and moments of great restlessness. The present moment once again is at an historical juncture in which the structures of liberation and authoritarianism, fascism, and democracy are vying for a future that appears to either be unthinkable, an unthinkable nightmare, or a realizable dream. We now live in a world that resembles a utopian a dystopian novel. Since the late nineteen seventies, a form of what I call gangster capitalism or what can be called neoliberalism has waged war on the welfare state, public goods, and the social contract. Neoliberalism believes that the market should govern not just the economy, but all aspects of society. All relationships are now commercialized. It concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite and elevates unchecked self interest, consumerism, deregulation, and privatization to the governing principles of society. At the same time, it ignores basic human needs such as health care, food security, decent wages, and quality and meaningful education. Neoliberalism views government as the enemy of the market, limits society to the realm of the family and individuals, and embraces what I call a fixed hedonism and challenges the very idea of the public good. Under neoliberalism, all problems are personal and individual, making it almost impossible to translate private troubles into systemic consideration. This is clearly one of the most dangerous and probably one of the most persuasive elements of of neoliberal thought. We live in an age when economic activity is divorced from social cause, meaning that we live in an age in which questions of social responsibility don't amount to much. While policies that produce racial cleansing, environmental destruction, militarism, and staggering inequality have become the defining features of everyday life. And also, to say the least, established modes of governance. Clearly, there is a need to raise fundamental questions about the role of education in a time of impending tyranny. Or to put it another way, what are the obligations of education to democracy itself? That is, how can education work to reclaim a notion of democracy in which matters of social justice, freedom, inequality become fundamental features of learning to live with with in terms of dignity in a democracy. The growing authoritarianism in The United States, as we all know oh, I think we know, is now led largely by far right republic a far right Republican party that has revealed in all of its ugliness the death producing mechanisms of white supremacy, systemic inequality, censorship, a culture of cruelty, and an increasingly dangerous assault on public and higher education. We now live in an age in which authoritarianism has become more dangerous than ever. We know and, of course, this is evident as a number of red states have put into place a range of reactionary educational policies that range from burning books in critical race theory to forcing educators to sign loyalty oaths, post their syllabuses online, forcibly, force them to post it online, give up tenure, and allow students to film their classes and much more. Not only are these laws aimed at critical educators and minorities of class and color, this far right attack on education is also part of a war on the variability to think, question, and engage in politics from the vantage point of being critical, informed, and willing to hold power accountable. More generally, it's part of considered effort to destroy public and higher education and the very foundations of political agency. Under the under the rule of this emerging authoritarianism, political extremists are attempting to turn public education into a space for killing the social imagination. A place where provocative ideas are banished and where faculty and students are punished to the threat of a force or harsh disciplinary measures for speaking out, engaging in dissent, and advancing democratic values. We all know that teachers who have spoken out against these far right agendas are often threatened. Their families are threatened. They're attacked at school board. School board members who defend them are now being threatened by far right goons. This is all now public public information. Schools that view themselves as democratic public spheres are now disparaged by far right republican politicians who snaringly define public and higher education, if you're ready for this, as socialism factories. The growing threat of authoritarianism is also visible in the emergence of an anti intellectual culture that derides any notion of critical education. What was once unthinkable regarding attacks on public education have become normalized. Under attack by the Republican party, legis Republican party legislators, teachers, parents, students, and librarians who oppose book burning, support critical pedagogy, and refuse to remove books from the classroom and library. And as such, they're increasingly being harassed, threatened, and if you're ready for this, called pedophile by extremists on the right. Furthermore, calls for social justice, racial equality, and a critical rendering of history are disparaged as unpatriotic education. Ignorance is now praised as a virtue. The right wing assault on democracy is a crisis that cannot be allowed to turn into a catastrophe in which all hope is lost. It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for educators to seriously take to take seriously the nest the necessary steps to make education central to politics. This suggests viewing education as a social concept rooted in the goal of empowerment and emancipation for all people, especially if we do not wanna default on education's role as a democratic public sphere. This is a form of education that encourages human agency by creating the conditions that enable students not only to be critical thinkers, but also critically engaged social agents. This is a pedagogical practice that calls students beyond themselves and embraces the ethical imperative to care for others, dismantle structures of domination, and become subjects rather than the objects of history, politics, and power. If educators are going to develop a politics capable of awakening our critical, imaginative, and historical sensibilities, it is crucial for us to remember education is a project of individual and collective empowerment, a project based on the search for truth and enlarging of the imagination and the practice of freedom. This is a political project in which civic literacy infused with the language of critique and possibility addresses the notion that there is no democracy without knowledgeable and civically literate citizens. Such a language is necessary to enable the conditions to forge a collective resistance among educators, youth, artists, and other cultural workers, it seems to be, who are actively engaged in fighting this form of domination. Critical education on multiple levels and in diverse spheres is especially important in a society in which a democratization of the flow of information has been reduced to the democratization of the flow of misinformation. It's important for us as educators to note that in the current, the current era is one marked by the rise of disimagination machines that produce manufactured ignorance on an unprecedented level. And in doing so, give authoritarianism a new life. Even worse, we live in a time when the unthinkable has become normalized in which anything can be said and everything that matters unsaid. Consequently, the American public is rapidly losing a language and ethical grammar that challenges the political and racist machineries of cruelty, state violence, and targeted exclusions. This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have become a national pastime, further normalizing an authoritarian politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, the suppression of dissent, and hate. The merging of power with new digital technologies in everyday of life have not only altered time and space, they've expanded the reach of a culture of culture as an educational force. A culture of immediacy coupled with a fear of history and a twenty four seven flow of information now wages war on historical consciousness, attention spans, and the conditions necessary to think, contemplate, and arrive at sound judgments. Under the circum such circumstances, it's important to acknowledge that education as a form of cultural work extends far beyond the classroom and its pedagogical influence, though often imperceptible, is also crucial to challenge and resist. We must remember that education and schooling are not the same, and that schooling must be viewed as a sphere distinctive from the education educative forces at work in the larger culture. Education is more than schooling and reinforces the notion of how important it has become as a general category, as a tool to shape consciousness, the public imagination, and agency itself. One important pedagogical lesson to be learned at a time when language is under assault and stripped of any viable meaning is that fascism begins with hateful words. The demonization of others considered disposable and moves on to attack ideas, burn books, arrest dissident intellectuals, attack gender minorities, and expand the reach of the carceral state in the horrors of detentions, jails detention centers, jails, and prisons. This is more this is more important to remember since education in the last decades has few four decades, particularly since the the election of Ronald Reagan, has diminished rapidly in its capacity to educate young people to and and others to be reflective, critical, and socially engaged agents. Increasingly, the utopian possibilities formerly associated with public and higher education as a public good, capable of promoting social equality and supporting democracy have become too dangerous for the apostles of authoritarianism. Public schools more than ever are subject to the toxic forces of privatization and mindless standardized curricula while teachers are deskilled and subject to intolerable labor conditions, not unlike Walmart workers. Unfortunately, public and higher education now mimic a business culture run by a managerial army of bureaucrats, more suited to work as accountants in pencil factories than in schools. At the same time, all levels of runs of education are under attack by right wing politicians who are censoring history, forbidding discussions about racism, eliminating tenure, and imposing enormous restrictions on teacher autonomy. The current forces of white supremacy are not the only threat to public in higher education. Since the nineteen eighties, conservatives and liberals have increasingly sought to model public education after a business culture, standardized curriculum, teach for the test, and flood teachers with one fit only models of teaching. This model was reinforced during the pandemic with its heavy emphasis on a on a what I would call a crude instrumentalization of pedagogy. This could and continues to be seen in an endless emphasis on training exercises to familiarize teachers with and students with Zoom, Teams, and other methods of online teaching. The commanding visions of democracy are in exile at all levels of education. Critical thought and the imagining of a better world present a direct threat not only to white supremacists, but also to those ideologues who narrowly embrace a corporate vision of the world in which the future always replicates the present in an endless circle in which capital and the identities that it legitimates merge with each other into what might be called a dead zone of the imagination and pedagogies of repression. One consequence is that the distinction between education and training has collapsed, and that the most valued educational experiences are geared for job preparation. What is clear is that corporate models of education attempt to mold students in the market mantras of harsh competition, unchecked individualism, and the ethos of consumerism. Young people are now told to invest in their careers, reduce education to job training, and achieve success at any cost. It's hard to imagine a a more sterile vision of education. It is precisely this re this replacement of educated hope with a repressive neoliberal project and cultural politics that also represents another dangerous assault on public and higher education. Under this corporate based model of schooling, the destruction of schoolings of public good is matched by the toxic merging of inequality, social sorting, racial cleansing, and the nativist language of borders, walls, and camps. In the shadow of this impending nightmare, the lesson we cannot forget is that critical pedagogy provides the promise of a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion, a space to question and challenge, and to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others, and in doing so, to understand what it means as educators to assume a sense of political and social responsibility. If the emerging authoritarianism and rebranded fascism in The United States is to is to be defeated, There is a need to make critical education an organizing principle of politics, and in part, this can be done with the language that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Hannah Horant was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden crystallized elements that make authoritarianism likely. We often call that the hidden curriculum of schooling, but now we have the hidden curriculum of politics. The language of critical pedagogy and literacy are powerful tools in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices. Moreover, it is true language that the history it is true language that the history of fascism can be remembered, and the lessons of the conditions that created the plague of genocide can provide the recognition that fascism does not reside only in the past and that its traces are always dormant even in the strongest democracies. The ongoing threat of fascist politics and its assault on the foundations of critical consciousness is one more reason for educators to make the political more pedagogical and the pedagogical more political. Making the pedagogical more political is crucial to recognize that pedagogy is always political, and that it's first and foremost a struggle over agency, over identities, over desires, over values, over knowledge, while also acknowledging that it has a crucial role in addressing important social issues and defining the future. Making the political pedagogical in this instance suggests producing modes of knowledge and social practices that not only affirm oppositional ideas and pedagogical practices, but also offer opportunities to mobilize instances of outrage coupled with direct mass action. What I'm saying here is that to make the political more pedagogical is to take seriously that the political is never removed from acts of persuasion. It's never removed for what it means to make something meaningful in order to make it critical, in order to make it transformative. That when we talk about making the political more pedagogical, we're talking about the struggle over identities and the language that educators need to use in which people can recognize themselves. They can, in some way, come to grips with the conditions in which they find themselves and be able to expand an analysis of those conditions in order to take it fear further than they ordinarily would. That's what it means to make the pedagogical more more political. Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple alleged ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue to encourage, to engage language in the pursuit of justice. James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning and no name in the street that ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. In the far right fascist playbook, thinking is now viewed as a threat, and thoughtlessness is considered a value, a a value that it wants to impose on everyone. As is well known, former president Trump's ignorance is still on display daily and lives through a Republican party which has been taken over by far right extremists. A culture of lies and thoughtlessness now serves as a tool of power to prevent politics from being held accountable. In addition, ignorance is the enemy of critical thinking, engaged intellectuals, and emancipatory forms of education. To put it differently, ignorance is dangerous, especially when it defines itself as common sense while exhibiting a disdain for truth, scientific evidence, and rational judgments. However, there's more at stake here than the production of a toxic form of illiteracy celebrated as common sense, the normalization of fake news and the emergence of a discourse of white supremacy. There is also the closing of the horizons of the political, coupled with explicit expressions of cruelty and a widely sanctioned ruthlessness. All we have to think about is the war on women's reproductive rights. So severe that laws are being passed now that claim that even if a woman's life is at is at risk while having an abortion, that her she should die rather than have the abortion. This is unimaginable and really reflects an age similar to the the the medieval times than it does the twenty first century. But it also suggests how education has now become a tool to produce a form of mass consciousness rooted not just simply in ignorance, but also in cruelty and a basic destruction of what I would call democratic values. Under such circumstances, there is a full scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance, and the what I would call the compassionate imagination. Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a commercialized relations commercialized relationships or in exchanges or a reductive notion of self interest. Freedom now means removing oneself from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into the privatized orbits of self indulgence, and so it goes. The new form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning ideas or knowledge, nor can they be solely attributed to what has been called the smartphone society. On the contrary, ignorance is a willful practice and goal used increasingly by the Republican party, and I think this is crucial to actively depoliticize people and to make them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives. Given the current crisis of politics, agency, history, and memory, and I think those categories are enormously important in terms of how they relate to each other. Educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing context and issues facing the world in which antidemocratic forces draw upon an unprecedented convergence of resources, financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control. If educators and others are to counter the forces of market fundamentalism and white supremacy, it's crucial to develop educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society. I'm not against the market per se, but I don't believe society should be basically modeled after a market, should be modeled after democratic values. Human needs should take precedent over profit and financial needs to say the least. Politics loses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot provide the educational conditions for enabling students and others to think against the grain and realize themselves as informed, critical, engaged individuals. There is no radical politics without a pedagogy capable of awakening awakening consciousness, challenging common sense, and creating modes of analysis in which people discover a moment of recognition that enable them enables them to rethink the conditions that shape their lives. As a result, educators should do more than create their conditions for critical thinking and nourishing a sense of hope in their students. They also need to responsibly assume the role of public intellectuals and border crosses within broader social context and be willing to share their ideas with other educators and the wider public by making use of new media technologies and a range of other cultural apparatuses, especially those outlets that are willing to address critically a range of social problems. Capitalizing on their role as civic educators, educators can can do more to speak to general audiences in a language that is clear, accessible, and rigorous. More importantly, as teachers organize to assert what the importance of their role as citizen educators in a democracy, they can forge new alliances and connections to develop social movements that include and expand beyond simply working with unions. We see evidence of this movement among teachers and students currently organizing against gun violence and systemic racism, and doing so by aligning with parents, unions, and other social movements in order to fight the gun lobbies and politicians bought and sold by the violence industries. Education creates, operates as a crucial site of power in the modern world. And if teachers are deeply concerned about safeguarding education, they will have to take seriously how pedagogy functions on local and global levels. Critical pedagogy has a key role to play in both understanding and challenging how power, knowledge, and values are deployed, affirmed, and resisted within and outside traditional discourses and cultural spheres. In a local context, critical pedagogy becomes an important theoretical tool for understanding the institutional conditions that place constraints on the production of knowledge, learning, academic labor, social relations, and democracy itself. Critical pedagogy also provides a discourse for engaging and challenging the construction of social hierarchies, identities, and the and ideologies as they traverse across local and national borders. In addition, pedagogy is a form of production and critique, offers a discourse of possibility, a way of providing students with an opportunity to link understanding and commitment and social transformation to seeking the greatest possible justice. This suggests one of the most serious challenges facing facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, and other cultural workers, which is the task of developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect what my former and late friend Paulo Freire said was a critical reading of the word and the world in ways that enhance the creative capacities of young people to provide the conditions for them to become critically engaged agents. In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, values, and the civic courage that enable them to struggle to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order, nor is it a blueprint removed from specific context and struggles. On the contrary, it's the precondition for imagining a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present for not making the present the future. Educated hope provides the basis for dignifying the labor of teachers. It offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change, affirms shared responsibilities rather than shared fears, and encourages teachers and students to recognize ambivalence and uncertainty as fundamental dimensions of learning. In this case, educated hope is tempered by the complex reality of the times and viewed as a project and condition for providing a sense of collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and engaged participation. Without hope, even in the most dire times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and struggle. Agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency. Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present. In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice. Democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as public education, in which civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of the future and take seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Without financially robust schools, critical forms of education, and knowledgeable and civically courageous teachers, young people are denied not just simply the knowledge of citizenship, but the habits of citizenship. Critical modes of agency and the grammar of ethical responsibility. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting pedagogy to the practice of freedom and social responsibility to the public good. I wanna conclude by making some suggestions, however incomplete, regarding what we can do as educators to save public education and connect it to the broader struggle of the democracy itself. First, amid the current assault on public and higher education, educators can reclaim and expand its democratic vocation, and in doing so, align itself with a vision that embraces its mission as a public good, not simply an economic good. Second, they can also acknowledge and make good in the claim that there is no democracy without informed and knowledgeable citizens. What does that mean? That means that education is not simply a public good. It's a vital public good. It's absolutely crucial to democracy. It's not just about educating our children, our individual children. It's about saving a society so that it always aligns with the virtues of democracy. Third, education should be defined as a crucial public good and funded through federal funds that guarantee a free quality education for everyone. The larger issue here is that education cannot serve the public good in a society marked by staggering forms of financial inequality. Inequality is a scourge and a curse and must be overcome if public and higher education are to thrive as a public good. And that cannot happen, it would I would argue, under gangster capitalism. Fourth, in order to keep alive the critical function of education, education should educators should teach students to engage in multiple forms of literacy, extending from print and visual culture to digital culture. Students need to learn how to become border crosses and think dialectically. Moreover, they should learn not only how to consume culture, but to produce it. And they should learn how to both be cultural critics and cultural producers. This is especially important at a time when culture is dominated by corporate interests. We need to educate students to be able to be cultural producers to create radio stations, to create films, to create alternative schools, and at the same time to work in those dominant institutions with one foot in and one foot out to know not just simply how their goals are, but how they work and how they can be transformed in the interest of something much broader, much more democratic, but much larger. Fifth, educators must defend critical education both as a search for truth and the practice of freedom. Such a task suggests that critical pedagogy should shift not only the way people think, but encourage them to work to shape a better world in which they find themselves. As a practice of freedom, critical pedagogy arises from the conviction that educators and other cultural workers have a responsibility to unsettle power, trouble consensus, and challenge common sense. This is a view of pedagogy that shouldn't make people comfortable. It should disturb them. It should inspire them. It should energize them. It should organize a vast array of questions that allow them to think outside and within in order to challenge the worlds that they occupy. Such a such a such pedagogical practices should enable students to interrogate common sense, their own common sense understandings of the world, take risk with their thinking, however difficult, and be willing to take a stand for free inquiry in the pursuit of truth, multiple ways of knowing, and mutual respect. Students need to learn how to think dangerously. And if I may put it in a way that may not sound, too agreeable, they learned they need to learn, as Bowen once said, how to be troublemakers. They need to learn, as Bell Hooks once said, how to talk back. They need to have enough confidence in their own knowledge and their modes of self determination to feel the energy of what it means to be an agent and not just a consumer. They need to know what it means to be a subject and not just an object. They need to seek education not as something that molds them, but as something that energizes them, as something that they can use as a tool in which they can understand a world so they can learn how not to be governed, but how to govern. It would seem to me that these are the tools of education that not only make people uncomfortable, they make them joyous. In the uncomfortableness, there's a joy. There's a joy about learning, about growing, about advancing, about understanding the world in a more complex and complete way, about, if I may put it differently, being in control of your own sense of social and political agency. Six, educators need to not need to argue for a notion of education that is inherently political. Let's do away with the nonsense that education should be neutral. Let's do away with the nonsense that neutrality is a virtue. It seems to me that there is no way that we can deny the political function of education. And in doing that, when you do embrace a distinction that I think is crucial. And the distinction is between what I call a political education and a politicizing education. A political education is that students learn about power. They learn about social relationship. They learn how society bears down on them in ways that shape them. They learn what the elements of truth are in a world in which we need to make a distinction between good and evil. That's a political education. It's an empowering education. A politicizing education is the education of indoctrination. It's an education which says this is my way or the highway. It's an education which says we live in a world of certainty. I'm giving you the tools for certainty. Shut up, or you'll be humiliated, or you'll be thrown out of school, or you'll be in some way viewed as as unreliable, and we will ruin your sense of self esteem and your own sense of political agency. You can't believe in something critical and be what I call a pedagogical terrorist. You can't do that. You need to understand that that the theories that we bring to these classrooms have to embody a practice that's empowering and not one that simply references who we are outside of the conditions that would enable students to actually question who we are and what we believe in and what we're talking about. Finally, I wanna suggest that in the society in which democracy is under siege, it's crucial for educators to remember that alternative futures are possible and that acting on those beliefs is a precondition for making change possible, radical social change. At stake here is the courage to take on the challenge of what kind of world we want, what kind of future do we wanna build for our children. The great philosopher Ernst Bloch insisted that hope taps into our deepest experiences and that without it, reason and justice cannot prevail. In the fire next time, James Baldwin, my favorite novelist, adds a call for compassion and social responsibility to this notion of hope, one that is indebted to those who follow us. He writes, generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them. The moment we break with one another, the sea engulfs us and the lights go out. Now more than ever, educators must live up to the challenge of keeping the fires of resistance burning with a feverish intensity. Only then will we be able to keep the lights on and the future open. My friend, the late Howard Zinn, rightly insisted that hope is the willingness, quote, to sustain even in times of pessimism, the possibility of surprise. In addition to that eloquent appeal, I would say that history is open. It's time to think differently in order to act differently, especially if as educators, we wanna imagine and fight for alternative futures and build new horizons of possibility. Thank you.

Speaker 3 There's a problem with education today. After decades of standardization and testing based reforms, students have become overwhelmingly disengaged from their schools, which seem irrelevant to their lives and interests. At Human Restoration Project, we are helping teachers, students, and administrators fight back against the systems of standardization and recreate education to be about purpose finding and community relevance. To do this, we're creating the Human Centered Schools Network, a collective of teachers, administrators, and schools committed to human centered education. Members can enter the network through a variety of streams. They might listen to our podcast, download our free open education resources, or participate in our PD and micro credentialing. Maybe they take a course that uses our materials, such as those at the University of Hawaii. Then, an entire school can contract with us to join the network. The whole school's model operates through five stages. First, teachers and staff are onboarded to the theory and practice of human centered pedagogy through a series of group discussions, activities, videos, and readings. Second, empathy interviews are conducted and analyzed with our AI transcription partner, Cortico, to determine the needs of the students. Third, educators use teacher action research to implement the principles of human centered pedagogy. Fourth, Human Restoration Project will check-in with teachers throughout the year to lend their support to their research. And fifth, teachers and admin connect with others throughout the Human Centered Schools network to share what they've learned. This is where the project truly takes off. As teachers train one another and share best practices, the network becomes a self sustaining project. With our model, together, we can restore humanity to education.

Speaker 1 I'm gonna go ahead and get things started here with some kind of introductory remarks, and then we're gonna go ahead and get started. So hello, everyone. Welcome to our q and a session with doctor Henry Giroux following his incredible keynote speech that we watched yesterday. Thank you again, Henry, for joining us today. Based off the conversations we had yesterday with folks, your speech was deeply resonated and led to a lot of great discussions. Before we get started, here's the format for today's session. First off, we kinda already did the formal introduction, so imagine that this is directly following the keynote speech. Therefore, we're gonna jump right into questions. We picture this as a semi open and formal conversation to learn from one another. The way that you'll do this is feel free to either write your answer in the chat. If you do that, I'll just read it out loud or raise your hand with the reaction button at the bottom of Zoom. In that case, I'll call on you to ask a question. Please make sure that you lower your hand afterwards so I know if it's a follow-up question or your hand's still up from before. Also, make sure that you mute if you're not the person currently speaking. We'll do our best to ensure that all the questions are answered. In the event that the question's very similar to another question, we might go on to others. To give you all some time to consider your first question, I did wanna share this thing, that Nick put together this morning, which is a summary of Drew's speech, which he is sharing right now. So there's a little little word cloud classic of what word or words would you use to describe doctor Drew's keynote. And we could see it's I hope the the seamless, like, things that are the goals of this conference and the folks that you are working through for the track, inspiring, hopeful, needed, democratic, challenging, empowering, and powerful, and and disruptive. All things that I think, challenge us to meet the needs of the moment, and recognize the fact that this work is needed now more than ever. Something that we keep saying over and over again is that it our current times are unprecedented, and every day really is unprecedented. And it's gonna take the work of the grassroots of teachers getting together and talking about these things and doing better in order for us to change, what's going on in education and in society at large. So with that said, we're going to go ahead and jump into it. I have not prepared any any questions whatsoever. So this is very much reliant on the community to to come together and ask anything. Feel free to take a second, Either write a question in the chat and or raise your hand, and we will go from there. While, we're getting ready here, Doctor. Drew, do you have anything that you wanna wanna say?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Refer to me as Henry. I I would prefer that. Alright.

Speaker 1 Lynx, you're first up. Go for it.

Speaker 4 Hi. Can you hear me?

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 4 Well, nice to meet you all. I'm very excited to be here. Name is Lynx. I use hehim pronouns. I'm a trans educator in Panama. It was very exciting to hear this keynote of very, very inspiring. There was a lot of discussion about teaching critical thinking and critical thinking in relation to poll what is going on politically in the world. And I was wondering if you could share some of the methods or things you have found that are a useful way of teaching this critical thinking. I find that, working with, human rights education, sometimes it is a bit hard getting people to think critically about the news. And it's not as simple as simply exposing them to what is going on. It's also teaching the skills necessary to be able to interpret that and interpret the different forces that are at play. So I would love to hear some of the methods that are useful for teaching this critical thinking and agency.

Speaker 2 I mean, I I I think that the the the question of methods is important, and I and I don't wanna downplay it. But I think we often fail to really understand the importance of what's at stake and what critical education and critical pedagogy is about by beginning with that question. I I really think the question to begin with in order to enter into that consideration is, you know, what's the purpose of schooling in the first place? You know, you need some kind of theoretical political framework to understand, you know, ways in which you kinda enter into that question in ways that resonate with approaches that are compatible with it. And I they put they put that in a very general way. I think we can sometimes we find ourselves being very critical about what education is and what it should do, but we engage in pedagogical methods that are dehumanizing. They're really at odds with the very vision that we bring we bring to the to the classroom. So I think that's the first issue. The second issue is, for me, it's it's always important to play around with a certain kind of tension in the classroom. And the first tension for me is to make students feel comfortable and safe. I I mean and not safe in a silly right wing way that says that they shouldn't be disturbed, but protected in that they should be able to be able to speak without having to feel that in some fundamental way, they're gonna be punished for it. Even when they're talking about issues that they're taking a chance and taking a risk and engaging in. And and that often demands a second issue, and that is how do we begin to learn a new language? How do we begin to challenge common sense with the language that's outside of the conditions that or or the educations that many of these students get? And I and I think that what I what I try to do is I try to provide a range of resources for people to read and to watch. Image culture is very important for me and my teacher because I deal with this generation that's basically plugged into images. And so it it it seems to me that, you know, the the resources that we use have to, in some way, resonate with the students that we're dealing with, have some connection to their lives, some connection to the world in which they live in. Secondly, it's very important around the question of voice for students to learn how to narrate themselves. You know, usually, they're on the end of a end of a pedagogy or or subjected to a pedagogy, which they basically kinda silence. You know, they they don't really have much to say. They're told to to learn for the test. They're treated as consumers and objects. And, know, I always have students in some way be try to create a pedagogical situation in which they're gonna have to analyze and respond to issues in in ways that would allow the class to join in. For instance, all my students have to write something, a a page, a paragraph, Because I want them to basically have a sense not only of their own voice and how important it is, but also to recognize that when we speak, there are consequences to what we say and that we should engage that, not as a threat, but as a way of enlarging the perspectives that we often bring to the classroom. Another issue is the question of culture. Look. All education is is is contextual. It's always contextual. And I and I think that while it's difficult given the conditions under which many of us have worked, and I was a high school teacher for over seven years, is that we we have to be aware of the context in which we these students emerge from, their histories, their communities, their deprivations, their strengths. I I remember I had a student in high school once. We're taking a test. I this is a kid I kind of really resonated with, reminding me of myself in some ways. And we I was giving a test, and he put his head down. You know? It's a male. And I I said something like I forgot his name. I said, Joe, is this a test? He says, you know, I'm sorry. I didn't eat breakfast this morning. Don't care. I mean, all of a sudden, I realized something profound happened to me, and that was that the usual ways in which I had been taught to basically pressure kids didn't work. It didn't work. The test was not a threat he acknowledged. The the notion of some kind of standard evaluation went out the window. I had to find other resources to talk to these kids. I had to find a language that was meaningful, that was critical, that was transformative. I had to find cultural elements that resonated with who they are and where they came from. I had to find ways to challenge them without putting their identities on trial. And I and I think we do that, as I mentioned, in the variety of ways that I've talked about. The the other issue is I never simply I I was lucky. When I taught, we didn't have curriculums imposed on us the way you do now. I didn't have that. You know? So I got I put books in the library. I paid for them. You know, I did all kinds of things that basically gave them options to deal with alternative sources, And that's really crucial. And also sources that they bring. You know, the narratives that they often bring are often at odds with the narratives that we bring to the school or the school wants to impose on them. And so it seems to me there's a variety of ways there in which those kinds of issues emerge and and and were dealt with. I hope that helps.

Speaker 1 I think that connects well to a question that Steve asked in the chat, which is given these different ways that we can impact the classroom, how do we go about navigating that, and how feasible is that underneath this concept of gangster capitalism?

Speaker 2 Well, I I mean, I I I think there are a couple of things to consider. I I think that, you know, because I use the term gangster capitalism, it was always gets me in trouble. It it basically suggests that you can't talk about schools outside of the broader socioeconomic context in which they exist. You just can't do that. At least I don't believe you can do that. And so to say that we operate within a system that privileges certain ways of looking at the world and certain ways in which we produce particular kinds of subjects. Right? And and how we assign particular meanings. You wouldn't we have to be conscious of that. We have to be conscious of the forces that bear down on us so that we can make them visible and we can challenge them. That's the first issue. Secondly, it it it it seems to me that, you know, we may live in a society that's moving towards fascism, which I truly believe it is, but that doesn't mean that you can equate power only with domination. I mean, there are always sites of resistance within these schools that can be negotiated. Some more diff clearly more difficult than others. But I I don't think that we should ever do this alone. I don't think the issue is to close the door and say, look. I'm gonna work around these pedagogue these these issues and try to do the best I can to educate students in spite of the pressures being placed on him or her or they or whatever. I mean, I I think that we have to learn to to work with others in in in the school. We have to learn to work with outside resources like your organization. You know, we have to learn to work with with other kinds of social movements. And I think to fight this alone, I think we're in trouble. I think when we privatize that struggle, we sort of surrender the political to the personal, and I think that's a script for defeat. And as difficult as it might be to organize with others, you have to do it. You know, it just simply has to be done. The other side of this, and maybe the fourth issue is, you know, we don't wanna despair because too much to say the least. We wanna be vigilant, but that's different than despairing. And I think that, you know, we can look at history, and we can look at the current moment of teachers who all over the The United States right now and and in Chile and in other places are really mobilizing. They've had enough. You know, whether we're talking about gun violence or, you know, teachers, elementary, junior high, high school teachers who are working three jobs, you know, and making $21,000 a year, who are being told they can't talk about transgender issues, who are being told to ban books, you know, who are being told that they only can teach patriotic education. I mean, you know, we're we're at a moment in our history where you can't look away, and this stuff really has to be challenged. And it and I and I think we see that happening. We see it happening with unions that are mobilizing once again. We see it happening with teachers who are walking out, who are in some ways bypassing even their unions, which sometimes tend to be enormously conservative in in terms of these things. So I think something is going on in the midst of gangster capitalism that is hopeful and provides maybe blueprints in some ways for how we should deal with these issues.

Speaker 1 Right. And that I think this is perfect then leading into what Dustin and Skyler were talking about, which is growing those partnerships. And, basically, who can we look toward partnering with. Dustin asked about, the connections between critical pedagogy and democracy and who in the local, state, national, international communities we can look to ally with beyond the traditional education system? And then kind of expanding upon that, Skyler asks, which people, movements, and developments give you hope in this fight?

Speaker 2 Let me let me say something before I actually named some movements. I mean, clearly, this is the Black Lives Matter movement, which is in in the forefront. But, you know, there there's also the the ecological movements. There are youth movements. There there's you know, in North Carolina, there's the the the the movement around questions of inequality and power. But I but I I I I think that what what is central to really address around this question is we have to be able to defend a notion of education that is not privatized. Meaning that we not only have to be able to defend it as a public good, we have to be able to defend it as something crucial to democracy. So that means I need to be able to we need to be able to talk to people whose kids are not in school. I mean and to be able to talk about the centrality and importance of education in a democracy. You know, what's at stake here is not whether your kid's gonna go to college or get a good job. What's at stake here is whether democracy is gonna survive. And that makes it very clear how crucial public education is. And I put the word on public because let's be clear here. The attack on education is not because it's failing. The attack on education is because it's public. It's a public good. When you get representatives on the right now claiming that that public schools are socialism factories or they basically teach communism at the expense of white Christian ideology, you know we're in trouble. And when I say we're in trouble, I mean that we don't wanna begin with the question of methods. We really wanna begin with the question of visions. We wanna begin with the question that really, in some way, ascertains how important school is as as a public good. Not to get back to these movements. When you look at movements like the Black Lives Matter movement, one in particular, which is not simply about racism. It's about inequality. It's about capitalism. It's about injustice. It's about a whole range of issues that it's trying to tie together. But not only that, in the manner of, let's say, an Angela Davis, is talking about how these struggles are international and how, you know, these groups, all of us have to learn from each other and find ways to come together under a larger banner in which our differences are important, but we can't allow them to be so siloed that they lose track of what it means of what the threads are that run through all these forms of opposition.

Speaker 1 And kind of this this is a little bit of a shift, but I think it takes that then to a very local level. Shelley asked about the effective processes and strategies to foment a shift in culture. She says that she's at a small independent school, and they may call themselves progressive, but she would describe it as being more of a multi cultural curriculum and student focused and a lot less focused on explicit anti racism or liberatory pedagogy or anything like that. So there is that focus on critical thinking, but the content presented doesn't include some of the challenging issues that you bring up in your keynote. How do you take this style of thinking and begin to shift toward critical pedagogy at a local faculty level?

Speaker 2 I I think we need to talk about to talk talk to people about how questions of representation are always tied to questions of history and to questions of power. And I think that once we inject the question of power into this discourse, something happens. You know, we're not just talking about a Benetton notion of representation. The more colors we have, the more you know, the better off we are. You know, we're talking about how these institutions in their own way, for instance, are complicitous complicitous with the very kinds kind of racism that they believe in some way that falsely believe they're addressing. You know, how how do we how do we, in some way, talk about what it means to talk about funding in public education? How do we talk about access? In other words, what are the mechanisms of power that gives a real meaning? The questions of representation when they're linked, the questions of justice, injustice, equality, and democracy. We need to expand that conversation by making clear what's not in it. What's not in it. You know, what the absences are here. And the absence of absences are often around questions of power, questions of race, questions of class, questions of gender orientations, questions of identity, questions of inequality. These are the issues that we really need to focus on. So we need to shift that conversation. I don't think we need to do it by simply dismissing it. I think we need to find ways to get into it, burrow into it, and all of a sudden make clear that its absences are more defining and far more important than the things that it focuses on and how inadequate they are if they really believe in justice. I mean, you know, you wanna take people at their word. Right? When I say, well, we're from multiculturalism. You wanna say, well, what does that have to do with questions of racism? What does it have to do with questions of inequality? What does it have to do with class differences? And how does the question of power enter into here both in terms of how this institution is structured and what its relationship is to larger considerations, political, social, and economic institutions outside of the school. That's, by the way, not just simply a shift in culture. That's a shift in politics. That's a shift in the kinds of questions that we're raising here and how culture is crucial as simply one element of that conversation.

Speaker 1 Hi. And I this is shift a in the question I have as you're as you're talking about this, which is I I'm sure many of us here, if not the majority of us, have been placed in a scenario where we've advocated for these things. And especially in the last two or three years as the the culture war has yet again kinda set its sights on teachers, calling folks like us groomers and pedophiles and all these ridiculous things. As we bring up concepts of anti racism or any kind of social justice type thing, these attacks come, both through social media, but that stuff does cater into, like, having meetings with administrators and, families coming in and complaining about our practices. And it's very personal, and are kinda dangerous too, and and violent. How do you feel teachers should respond when they are targeted in this manner for doing these practices?

Speaker 2 Aggressively. Sorry. Aggressively. And I think they need to do it en masse and collectively. I don't think we should sit back and just talk about this violence and then condemn it. I mean, it it seems to me what they're saying has to be challenged, what they're saying has to be dealt with with larger groups, what they're saying has to be dealt with, not just simply in the context of where it takes place, but also in the larger media. I mean, we just don't see enough people on the left and who are progressive talking about this stuff and challenging it. I mean, we really don't. You know, I I've been writing about critical pedagogy. I was born after Lincoln died. You know, I've been writing about critical pedagogy for fifty years, and it seems to me that it's with the exception of very few groups in The United States, progressives and the left have never really taken this that seriously. I mean, it's always about schooling. It's not about education in the broader sense. The the the culture is a form of education, for instance. And all the ways in which these mess messages, these right wing horrifically violent messages are being produced, disseminated. I mean, the right does something we don't do. The the left doesn't do, what progressives don't do, is they understand the power of ideas being propagated through the mass media as a potentially an enormously powerful educational force. And and and so we need to link education in schooling. We need to understand how they operate in different spheres. We need to understand what it means to push back, and we need to make clear, you know, what the consequences are for these kids. You know, think about it. I mean, you know, you you often hear the argument, I don't want my kid being humiliated, you know, made uncomfortable. Well, you know, one of the arguments I make is, do you really want your kid to be in class where in a in a classroom where if he or she are in in inundated with white supremacy ideology online, they have no critical tools to recognize it? I mean, do we really want our kids to be stupid? You know? Do you really want to make them vulnerable? If you're really talking about protecting kids, how does ignorance protect kids? You understand? I mean, these are really powerful arguments that basically go right at the heart of not just simply are they uncomfortable, but in ways in which they're being damaged, in ways in which they're being shortchanged, in ways in which this is not just simply saying we're erasing, instance, the history of slavery and racism, that we're erasing the possibility for your own kid to basically become an agent in the world and not be seduced by neo Nazis. So it it it seems to me that there's a way of entering into that conversation that's a lot different than being defensive. And I and I think we need to try to understand that more.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Exactly. Thank you. Thank you. Shifting over to David. David, do you wanna ask your question?

Speaker 5 Yes. Thank you. You actually the discussion between Henry and Chris basically took my question, which was, Henry, you talked about gangster capitalism, and on the TV last night was the godfather part two. And reminded me that you gotta punch the gangster in the mouth. Right? So when you say, respond aggressively, I think when when an organization and that right only, values power and values, you know, aggression, you know, sometimes you have to to be that. So my question is this. How when you talked about in your keynote being one foot in the organization, one foot in the world, you know, one foot, there's the tendency, I think, especially movements like the progressive, education movement, is that sometimes it it can become cannibalistic in the sense that, we you know, when when Michael grabs Fredo and says, it was you. No. This betrayal like, when when people who go to the other side, the dark side in a sense, and this has happened in some leaders in critical pedagogy, suddenly the outrage is, how could you betray the movement and to align yourself with these people and and organizations that do harm? And maybe it's good to be the divergent in that area and to be as almost like a a a sneaky divergent and fix the problems within, but the problem is how that's accepted by the larger community outside. So my question, I guess, is what happens when you are in a precarious situation? And you want you you are given those like you said, fifty years ago, you weren't given a curriculum. Well, let's say I am given a curriculum, and there's not a lot of wiggle room for me to to be a troublemaker. What do you suggest those teachers who find themselves isolated from the movement by themselves, which the, you know, which the the greater world wants to do to these teachers. Right? Put them in isolation. How do those teachers make change

Speaker 2 when their jobs are at risk or maybe even their lives are at risk, from from the reaction? No. No. It's a it's a it's a terrific question, David. And it it it points to three things for me. First of all, I I get that question a lot from teachers who are actually in that scenario. And I think the first thing I tell them is, hey. Look. First of all, you gotta go you gotta figure out and find those resources where other people are in the same situation and how they're doing it, how they're dealing with it. Because you don't wanna be alone here. And and while that may not be helpful in the most immediate sense of dealing with the monsters, so to speak, that are bearing down on you, you begin to gather resources and you begin to get a sense of hope that other people are addressing this question and trying to find ways to deal with it. And in some way, offering solutions. I mean, there's nothing I think is more important in that initial stage where you're isolated, you're threatened, you're fearful, you're scared. When all of a sudden, you're part of another community that's saying, hold on. Don't allow this to destroy yourself. Let's think about this. Let's look at the resources available. Let's see what we can do. You know, how can we get together somewhere else in a conference? Or how can we begin to share resources and deal with that? The second thing is I don't ever wanna you know, as a working class kid who grew up in enormous poverty, I have an enormous sensitivity to what it means to lose your job and to be basically not homeless, but without an income. That's a real threat. And I think we have to sometimes, in spite of the the nonsense that you'll get from some left purist, you know, we have to find ways to navigate this stuff. You know, navigate it to be able to keep our jobs, but never lose our dignity. You can never lose your dignity. Some of these steps are incremental for some of us, and some of them are huge depending upon the constraints that bear down on us. And we have to be supportive of those people who are basically operating under really terrible, really terrible harsh conditions. We have to find ways to support them, to find ways to get the resources, and to find ways to talk about how you know, in some cases, you may have to move. And, you know, sometimes you find yourself in situations that are just incredibly intolerable. And we, you know, and we have to think about these questions. I mean, it's you you we can't always say, stay there, suffer, good things will happen. Right? I mean, that's that's fine, but it sounds a little Pollyanna ish to me. But at the same time, we have to think of the larger considerations about people's lives, how they live. The worst thing that can happen to any of us is when we become subject to a set of circumstances in which the only thing we're thinking about is survival. When the politics of survival is the only politics you have left, you've been depoliticized. You've been depoliticized. And I think we need to resurrect this term and think about it in terms of the various conditions in which people find themselves who are being depoliticized through questions of fear and and so forth and so on. It's one of the reasons why in your, know, in your godfather analogy, I'm kinda smiling because, you know, when I say we have to fight back, I don't mean we assume the tactics they have. I mean, we just become very aggressive about what we stand for and what we won't tolerate. That's important. You know, the the battle here, David, in one way or another, whether we like it or not, is about ideas, and it's about visions. Ideas and visions are connected to hope, and they're connected to possibilities. We have a vision that doesn't close down the possibility, that's the groundswell. It's not enough. Ideas have to be married to action, and action has to be married to social movements. So that's I'm not sure that the the your question is very important, very complex, and I don't wanna brush over it, you know, in some kind of general way that doesn't really address that. But thanks for asking. It's terrific.

Speaker 1 Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Let's do I'm gonna read off Rachel's, and then I'll get to yours, Trevor. So Rachel asked a really important question here about students in the room and and doing this pedagogy with them. She says that she was struck by a powerful point made in the keynote that we need to engage in critical pedagogy that equips young people to, quote, unsettle power, trouble consensus, and challenge common sense. And, Henry, she wants to hear what you think about this in the context in which those demanding open dialogue deny the trauma for folks with historically marginalized and minoritized identities. Basically, how do we honor the need for risk taking while still honoring that space is how too often really caused harms to certain folks who aren't in positions of power? Another way of saying that is, like, how do we ensure we're discerning discomfort versus harm, to marginalized

Speaker 2 folks? I think the first thing that we wanna recognize that trauma is not the basis for agency. I mean, we have to be we have to understand that we're more than victims. At the same time, we have to be sensitive to the histories that people have and where they come from in creating the kind of protective spaces where these these issues can be talked about without punishing or humiliating people who engage in those issues. I mean, the one thing I don't wanna see happen around that issue is I don't wanna see the political collapse into the personal that the personal becomes all there is and the only measure of how we talk about what we talk about. I I so I it it seems to me that in the first instance, you've gotta create a supportive classroom where people can basically operate off the assumption you can't humiliate others. You have to listen to what they have to say, and you have to be sensitive to what you say in terms of who's in the room and what the context is and what the histories are that are flowing through that room at the moment. And it and it seems to me if there's possibility for a situation that's so overly dramatic for any one particular person, we have to find ways to separate that person from the entire class in ways that we can make them feel comfortable and bring them back in so that their trauma doesn't shut off the possibility of talking about anything that could make somebody uncomfortable or relate to a a particular kind of history. And that's a and it's difficult. I mean, that's not an easy thing to deal with. I mean, the first issue is you have to be comfortable in that classroom. You have to learn how to take risk. You have to learn how to say things that are troubling, and you have to learn how to deal with them in a way that doesn't attack the identity of the person there. I mean, the key is identities are not on trial here. What's on trial are ideas and how we navigate them and how they bear down on us and what their consequences are and how they become something more than simply person.

Speaker 1 And I I wanna call attention to to Hannah says in the in the chat that this is very affirming. She thinks about her, experience in Ontario and how many educators who are doing this work are being labeled alarmist, by saying that, like, public education is being privatized. And there's a very distinctive narrative that Canada's educational foundations are so vastly different from the state's, which is not true. There are there are a lot of similarities, which I'm sure resonates with you, Henry, given that you you live in Canada, so you you have that that context. Trevor, I believe you're up next if you wanna ask your question.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Thanks. So one of the questions that I have, is kind of, I think, pulling out a thread that has been emerging in the conversation is, how can we, sort of repair the divide that's emerging between theory and practice? So, like, a lot of these ideas that we're discussing, both in the conference, and in this, discussion are, I think, kind of emergent in academic journals. They've been presented at conferences. They aren't necessarily new. But a lot of, like, the language that is used to present these ideas often is, you know, targeting other academics, funding, academic prestige, etcetera, instead of, you know, trying to reach practitioners. So what do think it looks like to kind of build a coalition vertically, you know, between classroom teachers and the academy as well as, horizontally, between teachers and educators in the classroom?

Speaker 2 I yeah. Thanks, Trevor. It's it's it's it's an important question that honestly has honed in my life for forty years. You know? How how do we talk about how do we talk about overcoming the binary between theory and practice? Right? I I mean, practice without theory seems to me uninformed. Theory without practice seems to me to be dislocated, you know, and out of touch. And and it's central to me in that issue a couple of categories that I hope will be helpful. One is I don't believe that the distinction between theoretical work and accessibility really is at odds with each other. I think we can talk in a language that's accessible. I don't care how complex it is. I I completely reject the the the notion that comp that ideas that are sophisticated have to be put into a language that's abstruse, arcane, and almost unintelligible almost unintelligible. And and that means that, particularly for academics in in this case, you know, they have to learn how to be public intellectuals. I mean, you're a public intellectual. You learn to speak to multiple audiences in multiple ways. And you learn that, you know, you have to be accessible and clear in order to be able to make sure that people resonate and recognize what you're saying, not only with respect to the problems they find themselves in, but with respect to who they are and what it means to those issues. So the question of clare, crucial. Absolutely crucial. The other side of this is that, you you know, as as public intellectuals, we have responsibilities. And that responsibility means that we have to be able to talk to people in ways in which they can understand what we're saying. And I don't think the argument that this is too complex to be made accessible is is is workable. I mean, I I don't think it's fair, and I think it's wrong. And I think it's often a cover for people to talk in a language in which they only speak to five other people, and they claim, well, that's what theory does. And that's not what theory does. That's what theory shouldn't do, actually, in my mind. Secondly, I think you have to be a border crosser. You don't mean not only have to learn you you know, the question off often is, who are you speaking for? Well, as crucial as that question is, I raise another question. That's who's listening. You know? Who's listening here? Right? And and how do we how do we address that issue in some fundamental way? And if we're gonna take that question seriously, then it is not that we speak for others. It's that we speak for democracy by talking about race, talking about class, LGBTQ issues, environmental issues in ways that are both accessible and resonate with piece of people's histories and their cultures. You know, we don't just speak for and about. We have to learn from people. And the question is, how do we enrich our own theories by basically expanding the possibilities of what they mean, how they're navigated, and how they're expanded in dialogue with others. Because the theory action divide is often a one dimensional divide in terms of its flows. I have the theory. I'll provide them from you. Well, that's just bullshit, you know, to say the least. It it seems to me there are many, many people who come into these issues with enormous experiences that they're theorizing and talking about. You know, Gramsci used to say, everybody's an intellectual. It's just that some people have the privilege of having a job in which their intellectual skills get you get paid for that. But, you know you know, forgive me. I'll tell you a four second story. I came home from college. My father was a truck driver and a mechanic. He was working on his car, and I started talking about Nietzsche. And he said, what? Nietzsche? Are you kidding? He said, look. Do know how to take this carburetor apart? Nope. He said, you know how to change a muffler? You know? And it it goes on and on. Right? And he said to me, let me tell you something. When you think your language is the only language that matters, you'll never learn anything in life. And he got it. And I that that was a that was a a transformative moment in my life. Different people enter these conversations with different languages and different experiences. And I say to academics, they don't understand that grow up. Just simply grow up. You know? Really. The stakes are too high to believe that theory and practice are basically at a divide which one operates in the academy, the other operates in the realms of everyday life. Or that theory is so abscrews, it can't be translated in ways that are accessible and produce enormous, it seems to me, possibilities for expanding who we are as political and social agents. So border crossing, accessibility, clarity, all these things matter. I don't know if that helps. Does that help at all? Oh, Chris. Thanks for the question, really.

Speaker 1 Nick, go ahead.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I'm hoping that to kinda balance out what what can kinda be at the heavy part of my question with sort of the the hopeful end. But so a couple of things. You know, a lot of your writing lately has really dealt with the contemporary context for, you know, where where we are in terms of democratic backsliding and of not just creeping authoritarianism at this point, but but barreling. You know, we're we're on the downhill slide into that. And I and so I think I'm I'm curious to hear from from you on the one hand here kind of what what do you imagine is sort of the worst case scenario here for for for extrapolating on the political trends as as you're seeing them currently? But then the flip side of this too, one of the things that I have grabbed onto over the last couple years of the pandemic has been that notion of, you know, in times where nihilism and cynicism is the easy way out, that notion of radical hope could be something that we we anchor ourselves to and we can we can anchor our work in as well. So how do we balance perhaps what you see as the worst case scenario for this with, you know, needing to needing to be needing to anchor our work and our perspectives in hope? Otherwise, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Speaker 2 I mean, the the worst case scenario we've already seen, and we saw it in the nineteen thirties in Italy and Germany, and we saw it in Latin America, particularly in the Pinochet in Argentina and other places in the nineteen seventies. The worst scenario is fascism. I mean, I, you know, I I use that term, and I don't use it lightly because I believe that fascism can emerge in different forms. It doesn't mean that it has to absolutely replicate in every possible way what we saw in Nazi Germany in the nineteen thirties. I think that's absolutely nonsense. Hannah Horanter has written about their primo levy. I find it hard to debate that point anymore. So, yes, what I see coming is unlike anything I've seen in my lifetime. That's for sure. You know? These people are very dangerous. I think they will put people in jail. I think they'll turn schools into something that we we we we we might have seen with the evangelicals, you know, who were creating these schools that groom people to be absolutely mindless. So the threat is real. But but at the same time, in terms of your your latter question, the way I entered that discourse is that without hope, there's no agency. Without hope, there's no sense of being able to imagine how to fight this stuff and what a different future might look like. Without hope, there's cynicism and despair. So in the long run, you can't have politics without hope. And I'm not willing to give up politics. And I'm not willing to suggest this is not a political question anymore. I I don't wanna reduce this issue to an existential question. And I think that we have a long history of of people who have resisted. Even in the camps, they resisted. As as my my partner and my wife, Rania, reminded me the other day, in the camps, people even fell in love. You know? I mean, the which is not to, in some way, downplay the horror here. But I'm always amazed at what it is about human beings even in the worst of times and their ability to resist, you know, in their ability to fight back, their ability not to look away. I'm always moved by that. You know? And it and it seems to me that when I put it into a larger context, it's very simple. The choices between hope and deep politicization, The choices between hope and the possibility of a better world. The choices between hope and sin and cynicism. The the choices between hope and the the ability to imagine that resistance matters. And I'm not talking about a notion of hope that in in some fundamental way, you know, we see in Disney. Right? I I mean, you know, hope is different. Hope is it it assesses the realities of what we have to face and then addresses those realities. So it I mean, even in even in the world of Disney, I mean, can you imagine? I mean, they actually forced the LGBTQ people forced Disney to reverse its position around what, of course, DeSantis was doing, who was, to me, one of the most dangerous people in The United States, more so than even Abbott. So I I think that that question of hope is not just important. I think it's crucial. And I think we have to rescue it from its often depoliticized, Pollyanna's, oh, let's all pray together, you know, after a school shooting. We'll pray together. Well, not really. You know, let's act together. Not pray together. Simply act together. You wanna pray? That's fine. But let's act together. Let's do everything we can to address these issues, mobilize, stop them, and confront these issues in ways that in some way suggest there are no guarantees. There are no guarantees of what we're all doing here. And the only way in which you can take that question seriously is to imagine a politics that's infused with struggle and hope. That's it. You know? I don't know if we're gonna win, but I know this. The stakes are too high not to win. That's that's the key.

Speaker 1 Thank you. That makes sense. Yeah. That that's Nick, does that address the question? Yeah. So we have about ten minutes left here. Feel free again to either raise your hand and or ask a question in the chat. I do have a quick question here, then, Lynx, I'll have I'll turn it over to you. This kinda relates back to Trevor's question. The folks here are mostly educators, but there's also authors and researchers, professional developers, or any combination of those things. When we blend teaching and business to keep the doors open, The dangers of embracing funding to grow our reach and spread these ideas in this very neoliberal space. How do you and folks that are spreading their ideas go about doing that at a mass scale when the things that you're talking about aren't necessarily easily marketed, whether it be, like, us getting, a grant or publishing ideas through a publisher or whatever it might be. How do we spread our ideas without, kinda being corrupted by the institutions?

Speaker 2 I I think the first thing you don't wanna do is be a purist. I mean, the first thing you don't wanna you you I I would reject this by saying corporations are evil, and therefore, I really wanna accept money, and that's it. I'm sorry. You know? People are being thrown under the bus. I And think that we need need to make a distinction between what I would call acceptable reforms and the strategies that emerge from them and what I would call the necessity for a radical transformation of the existing society. You you know, if if a core if I can convince a corporation with no hands, no no attachments to provide endless amounts of money in order to make sure that the kids are coming to my school have school lunches, I'm sorry. I'm gonna do that. And I'm not gonna respond overly respond to the stupid criticism that I've sold out. Right? It it's one thing to get the money with no qualifications and tell these corporations they're really great citizen corporations. That's fine. But at the same time, I know in the back of my head, they have to go. You know? That in the long run, I don't want corporations that that dominate politics, right, under any fundamental way fundamental way. And that that's an argument against capitalism. That's what that argument is. But I need to be able to understand the context and the separations for these arguments in ways that allow us to be more flexible and to and to help people who in the most immediate sense need that help. The urgency of the issue should dictate the degree to which we're willing to step and have one foot in and one foot out. And when sometimes that one foot in is absolutely essential. It's essential. Right? Corporation says, wanna give cameras to kids. Can you will you do that? You bet I will. As long as they don't dictate what the curriculum is, and as long as they don't dictate what I have to say, and as long as they don't dictate some fundamental imposition on the autonomy that I might have as a teacher to produce what I'm doing both in my class and outside of

Speaker 1 Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. That's a perfect answer. We probably have time for two more, maybe three more questions. Links, go ahead.

Speaker 4 Thank you. Thank you very much for the space. It has driven me to challenge myself a lot. And I think my question is along so how do we challenge neoliberal thinking? I live in a context where there is barely any left, And so the existence is the far right and then neoliberalism and this idea. And this is where you find, any kind of democratic values or human rights values. And so a lot of the people I work with as an educator are neoliberalists, and I'm very interested in how to bring the understanding that these problems are not personal, not individualistic. I was very, interested. There's a saying that is said a lot, in LGBT education, which is that the personal is political. And it is interesting the way that has been used to turn the political into personal as if simply existing outside the norms of society is enough resistance. Yeah. And we don't have to do anything beyond that. Right. And so I'm interested in how how do you challenge those ideas? How do you have that conversation? Or or where do we start this conversation? Sure. And it's

Speaker 2 a terrific question. And I and I think that, first of all, neoliberalism has to be named. You know, you have to know what its ideas are. You have to know what the assumptions are that basically drive it. And you have to come to grips with, in very vivid ways, about how democratic undemocratic it is. I mean, it has nothing to do with democracy. It basically undermines democracy. Whether we're talking about it's the core the claim that self interest is the only thing that matters. How do you have a society where self interest is the only thing that matters? How do you have a society that sanctions money drives driving politics? How do you have a society that privatizes everything and hates the public good? How do you have a society that claims in some fundamental way that the only purpose of the government is to basically protect markets when market values have nothing to do basically with human needs? So I think that what you have to do here is you have to build a case to make clear how this ideology since the nineteen seventies has caused massive amounts of damage in terms of staggering inequalities, the flight from any sense of social responsibility, the denial of the importance of human needs over over the the, accumulation of capital and human profits. You have to name it. You have to break it down. You have to make clear how antidemocratic it is, and you have to make clear why we need to fight it if we believe in public goods, if we believe in the social. You can't have a society that makes a claim to democracy when it denies the social. It just simply denies it. You know, when it when it denies public goods, when it denies in any fundamental way and sees as cruel I mean I mean, sees as a disadvantage, compassion and justice. You know? I mean, look. You know, when you look at people from Hayek to to, Friedman now, Milton Friedman, when when you look at these people, the one thing that stands out in their neoliberal hysteria is that the one thing we should divorce ourselves from is any sense of social responsibility. The second thing they say is all problems are individual problems. Think about it. You individualize everything, and you utterly depoliticize people. You really wanna solve the ecological problem? Make sure your green bin is full. Make sure you you you use a green bin. Right? Sec thirdly, they prevent in that ideology by privatizing everything. They prevent the possibility, it it seems to me, of translating private troubles into larger systemic issues. You know? I mean, when when neoliberal say they're in favor of freedom but not justice, think about it. Think about what freedom means in this case. It means you can ignore science and kill your grandmother, if not your children, right, by by claiming, I'm not. It's all about my freedom. But that's not what freedom is about. It's not just about self interest. It's about the public good. It's about the common good. It's about the social contract. And my argument about neoliberalism is it destroys the social contract, destroys democracy, and destroys all the elements. So that when you say to me, as you mentioned, that, you know, the political now the personal was political now that's been turned around. That's a neoliberal ideology. It's an ideology that individualizes everything, even the political, and says to you, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. You're right. That's all there is is the is the personal. Right? We have to know when we're inhabiting a neoliberal ideology and not aware of it and not even be aware of how seductive that can be in terms of the issues that are being posed and the way we respond to them.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Thank you. This has this has been incredible, and the hour went by so quickly. Before, I address some upcoming things going on at the conference, again, thank you, Henry, for being here. Do you have any, closing remarks or closing statements you'd like to make to the group before, we wrap up? Yeah. I'd like to say, first of all, thank you for inviting me. I'm very honored.

Speaker 2 And I I I can't tell you how important I think our our jobs are as educators. I mean, you're the last line of defense, and I mean that. You're the last line of defense. We need to defend what we do. We need to defend the importance of education. We need to link it to questions of democracy. We need to make clear that all education is a struggle over identities. It's a struggle over agencies. It's a struggle over hope, and it's a struggle over the future. So don't give up hope. Fight as hard as you can. Never allow yourself to be feel completely alone, and take some some some hope in the sense that part of this the outcomes of what we're seeing are not guaranteed here. Sometimes history changes in a way that's often unexplicable and not anticipated, and that's where we wanna go.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Thank you so much. Seriously, it's it's it's an honor, to have you here with us and to to share these ideas with us. I wanna remind everyone that today, there is a video released of doctor Nisha Jones' keynote, which connects almost too well, to Henry's speech. She is the coeditor of Black Lives Matter at School and a member of the Black Lives Matter at School steering committee. Make sure you watch that because we'll have a q and a session with her tomorrow at 11AM eastern. And then if you want, in about an hour or so, you can join David Buck, who's with us in the Zoom call to talk about growing the movement in online spaces and and what we can do kind of logistically to organize ourselves online. So again, Henry, thank you for being here with us. It's been awesome, and we'll talk to you all really soon.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Bye bye.

Speaker 1 Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education. You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.

Speaker 2 No.