pedagogy and the public sphere

Education is in a crisis. Professor of Media at McMaster University Henry Grioux argues in his 2008 article entitled “The Militarization of US Higher Education after 9/11” that neoliberalism has caused education to increasingly focus upon producing productive members for the global workforce while uniquely foreclosing the opportunity to view education as an end in itself. The influence of neoliberalism upon higher education has distorted the focus of curriculum to be oriented towards profit motives instead of towards the genuine appreciation of knowledge or the empowering of society as a whole. The only solution to this problem is to “reclaim higher education as a democratic public sphere, one that provides the pedagogical conditions for students to become critical agents who connect learning to expanding and deepening the struggle for genuine democratization” (Giroux). I personally feel like much of the literature in the assigned reading this past few weekend is focused on a vision of liberal arts education that can achieve many of the goals articulated by Henry Giroux.

Henry Giroux at his finest

A passage in the anthology notes that the purpose of experiential learning is to “make the value of education more obvious because you begin connecting information to the “real world.”” (45). It inherently connects the value of education towards real life struggles that are occurring in the status quo instead of future job opportunities that might improve the country’s GDP. Experiential learning is inherently more organic, and I feel like it translates to more direct benefits to society. This goal for thought is a process that tries to move “an individual to membership in a community; so a thought, begun in the seminary of a single mind, participates in the construction of a citadel of living ideas, of a life organic and yet shaped” (293). This is clearly the purpose of a liberal arts education. Similar to lots of the focus on animals and ethics that we have in Bump’s class, we are trying to connect our thinking with broader notions of empathy and acknowledgement of the material struggle of others. Liberal arts education fundamentally changes the paradigm of thought so that it is oriented towards more ethical goals instead of merely self-interest.

we don't want education to be focused on this

One other problem that I feel like exists with many normal modes of education is what I like to call “thinking in islands” instead of holistically. The separation of different modes of thought into different classes and departments makes it seem like knowledge exists in isolated spheres. However, knowledge is simply the attempt to discover and describe the world. all forms of knowledge inherently compliment each other. Interdisciplinary forms of knowledge function to “unsettle the boundary lines between science and science, to disturb their action, to destroy the harmony which binds them together. Such a proceeding will have a corresponding effect when introduced into a place of education. There is no science but tells a different tale, when viewed as a portion of a whole, from what it is likely to suggest when taken by itself, without the safeguard, as I may call it, of others” (288).  Rather than understanding instances of physics or biology as separate, all of these modes of thought are very intimately related with each other. I feel like the interdisciplinary focus of Plan II and of liberal arts education in general provides a more holistic, and thereby more accurate, world view. The quest for knowledge is situated in a more ethical manner this way.



Henry Giroux. 2008. “The Militarization of US Higher Education after 9/11”. Theory, Culture & Society. Pages 58-59.