Giroux, Henry

Henry Giroux (1943–) is a North American critical theorist and public intellectual specializing in critical pedagogy, cultural studies (particularly film studies and youth studies), educational reform, and contemporary debates about war, terrorism, and neo-liberalism (neo-laissez-faire economics). Giroux is influenced by various thinkers and traditions, including but not limited to Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, John Dewey, Stuart Hall, Zygmunt Bauman, Stanley Aronowitz, and, most of all, Paulo Freire. Freire's work with critical pedagogy in marginalized [Page 150]Brazilian communities helped establish Giroux's own educational philosophy: Education exists at the center of the social landscape and thus constitutes a site of cultural, political, and economic contestation; rather than perpetuating traditional “banking models” of learning, education should be a liberatory and transformative experience of personal growth, political resistance, and democratic citizenship.

Giroux's personal background influences his philosophy and intellectual endeavors. He grew up in a Providence, Rhode Island, working-class neighborhood where basketball, odd jobs, racial tensions, and class barriers were common. He earned basketball scholarships to two junior colleges. He dropped out of the first school but successfully finished at the second. He went on to earn a master's degree in history at Appalachian State University. This enabled him to teach secondary school in a small town outside Baltimore, Maryland. He became a community organizer after witnessing racial segregation and gender and class injustices in the school system. This led to his eventual dismissal. He moved back to New England and taught high school in a white, upper-class Rhode Island suburb. Local conservatives publicly condemned his courses on “society and alienation” and “race and feminism.” Giroux eventually left, earning a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University in 1977. His first professorship was in education at Boston University. Despite an impeccable record of publications and endorsements, he was denied tenure for political reasons. He went on to establish a stellar career, teaching education and cultural studies at Miami University, Penn State University, and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Giroux's critical pedagogy focuses on both critiquing and offering alternatives to prevailing educational norms. Borrowing an idea from educational philosopher John Dewey, Giroux argues that education should not be approached as a function of an already existing society; instead, society should facilitate an open-ended, experimental, exploratory education. Schools too often center their efforts on job preparation, standardized testing, instrumental reasoning, and unquestioned obedience to authority. Students are then inculcated into accepting and perpetuating such injustices as racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, violence, and economic inequality. Giroux's critical pedagogy counters this tendency by strengthening students' skills in democratic citizenship—students should learn to think critically about, analyze, and debate pressing political issues, speak back to authority, and change social injustice. The overall educational experience should enable students to discover, create, and pursue their own passions, imaginations, and intellects in ways that counter (rather than conform to) the already existing society.

Essential to developing a critical, democratic education is Giroux's notion of teachers as transformative intellectuals. According to Giroux, teachers must resist the myth of absolute objectivity and the urge to teach to the test or apply one-size-fits-all approaches that ignore or exclude students' diverse learning styles, wants, and needs. Teachers must recognize the implications of their own labor: Students, teachers, administrators, and entire schooling systems do not simply exchange or disseminate objective knowledge but instead reflect and, more important, produce knowledge, experiences, values, beliefs, relationships, norms, and subjectivities. Teachers should thus seek to expose, critique, and alter the various power relations that exist within their schools and classrooms. Such transformative, intellectual work becomes a form of cultural politics that precedes and exceeds the narrow confines of traditional education. Borrowing the feminist notion of “the personal is political,” Giroux argues that teachers have the opportunity—and even the obligation—to work at the micro level of face-to-face immediacy: student-to-student and student-to-teacher interactions are imbued with a transformative potential that enables both self and other to reconceptualize, reorient toward, and thus alter the wider world.

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