13 Quotes by Henry A. Giroux

For the ancient Greeks, the ultimate test of the educational system was the moral and political quality of the students that it produced

Pedagogy is always about power, because it cannot be separated from how subjectives are formed, desires mobilized, how some experiences are legitimized and others are not, or how some knowledge is considered acceptable while other forms are excluded from the curriculum.

Not surprisingly, the all-powerful evocation of terrorism is reserved only for those acts that threaten the government-sponsored status quo, but not that perpetrated by the state or corporations against the population. So, for example, the ugly history of white people lynching, bombing, and killing Blacks in the United States is not understood, taught, or remembered as a part of the homeland’s history of terrorism.

Americans need to continue to develop broad-based movements that reject the established political parties and rethink the social formations necessary to bring about a radical democracy. We see this in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as in a range of other movements that are resisting corporate money in politics, the widespread destruction of the environment, nuclear war and the mass incarceration state.

Torture when inflicted on childrenbecomes indefensible. Even among those who believe that torture is a defensiblepractice to extract information, the case for inflicting pain and abuse upon childrenproves impossible to support.

Democratic ideas cannot exist without the public spheres that make them possible.

We live in a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory.

resistance often lacks an overt political project and frequently reflects social practices that are informal, disorganised, apolitical, and atheoretical in nature. In some instances it can reduce itself to an unreflective and defeatist refusal to acquiesce to different forms of domination; on some occasions it can be seen as a cynical, arrogant, or even naive rejection of oppressive forms of moral and political regulation

Children have fewer rights than almost any other group and fewer institutions protecting these rights. Consequently, their voices and needs are almost completely absent from the debates, policies, and legislative practices that are constructed in terms of their needs.