The public defunding of universities, along with their seizure by corporations and the uber rich, is part of the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. The goal is to enforce conformity and obedience, to train young people to fill their slots in the corporate machine and leave unquestioned the status quo. The accumulation of vast wealth, no matter how nefarious, is prized as the highest good.
Understood properly, neoliberal capitalism is a form of necropolitics, or more specifically, a type of gangster capitalism that is utterly criminogenic. Gangster capitalism thrives on the silence of the oppressed and the complicity of those seduced by its power.
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 and higher education in which civic values, public scholarship and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity and civic courage.
"I want to suggest that in a society in which democracy is under siege, it is crucial for educators to remember that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs is a precondition for making radical change possible. At stake here is the courage to take on the challenge of what kind of world we want to build for our children."
An unimagined catastrophe characterizes how American education is being shaped by far-right Republican Party.
Stitt claimed that the law would protect children from feeling “discomfort” over learning about discrimination and other acts of bigotry in the U.S. — a common talking point among far right officials and pundits,,,
What critical race theory actually is. Watching the news or browsing social media, it would be easy to think that critical race theory is a complicated, controversial, or new idea.
"Tennessee school board banned Spiegelman’s book on the grounds, at least nominally, that it contained naked cartoon mice — Jewish victims in a concentration camp and Spiegelman’s mother, who committed suicide, in a bathtub — and profanity as well (like that word “damn!”)."
"In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West." How we find ourselves in our present state of an antidemocratic state.
"How can education be enlisted to fight what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher once called neoliberalism’s most brutal weapon, “the slow cancellation of the future?”
"Economic inequality is the bedrock of neoliberalism." "In an age when it seems to me all problems are seen as individual problems and there is no understanding of how to basically conceptualize the social, That has to be one of the most powerful ideologies for domination that has come along for 400 years..."
Click to see Mr. Fish's once again on-the-mark cartoon. The wonderful featured image about organizing is from Ricardo Levins Morales. And who is Clark Kent when he's at home?
