Neoliberalism and the Attack on Education | 305
Neoliberalism and the Attack on Education: An Interview with Henry A. Giroux Heather McLean Heather McLean1 (HM): In your latest book, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, you identify the broad project of neoliberalism as the key mode of governance, policy and ideology threatening public education. What are your greatest concerns? How can we fight back? Henry A. Giroux2 (HAG): Public and higher education are under siege in neoliberal societies for a number of reasons. First, they are under attack because they are public, not necessarily because they are failing. As public sites, they offer potential spaces, pedagogies, and modes of thinking that are critical, thoughtful, and, frankly, dangerous because they not only offer the conditions to inspire students to be self-reflective and critically engaged, but also energize them to connect what they learn to what it might mean to hold power accountable, address social injustices, and both imagine and struggle for a more just world. Public and higher education are considered dangerous because they harbor the possibility of speaking the unspeakable, uttering critical thoughts, producing dissent, and creating students willing to hold power accountable. The apostles of neoliberalism, on the other hand, want to eliminate the critical function of public education on all levels and they are working hard to transform these institutions into disimagination factories. My biggest fear that as more and more students labour under onerous debt, subjected to a form of indentured citizenship, coupled with modes of 1
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Heather McLean is an Urban Studies Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Geography Department at the University of Glasgow. Inspired by feminist and queer ways of knowing, being, and making, her research examines the contradictory role of community-engaged arts practice in neoliberal urban planning regimes. Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department, and is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University. His most recent books are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014), and The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014). He maintains a collection of his writing at www.henryagiroux.com.