Henry Giroux

truthout, June 4, 2009
The Substance of Truth: Let Us Make Haste While We Can: Conversation With Henry Giroux (Part I)
by: Tolu Olorunda

Those who are yet to become engaged with the work of Henry Giroux are missing out - big time. He is an accomplished scholar in the fields of education, media, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and entertainment. As author of more than 35 books, very few public intellectuals can lay claim to the kind of expansive career Henry has nurtured for over four decades. But he’s hardly amused by academic accomplishments. Henry’s devotion to the transformation of the education system, and the cultivation of democratic values in this age of market-driven control, has often put him at odds with a system he describes as “The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (The Radical Imagination).” Henry Giroux is also known as a confidant and colleague, for almost two decades, of the late, legendary Paulo Freire. Giroux’s work with Freire helped ignite a fiery passion in him, forever burning until the day the promise of a quality existence is extended to the hands of every living, breathing child.

I was privileged to engage Henry in conversation on several topics threatening the future of our democratic society. Included in the discourse were questions of democracy in the context of an emerging omnipresent neoliberalism, in which “the relationship between the private and the public has absolutely collapsed”:

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, AGENCY, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RADICAL DEMOCRACY

“Critical pedagogy argues that school practices need to be informed by a public philosophy that addresses how to construct ideological and institutional conditions in which the lived experience of empowerment for the vast majority of students becomes the defining feature of schooling.”

-Henry Giroux, November 1999.

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