Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance

Henry A. Giroux argues that education holds a crucial role in shaping politics at a time when ignorance, lies and fake news have empowered right-wing groups and created deep divisions in society. Education, with its increasingly corporate and conservative-based technologies, is partly responsible for creating these division. It contributes to the pitting of people against each other through the lens of class, race, and any other differences that don't embrace White nationalism. Giroux's analysis ranges from the pandemic and the inequality it has revealed, to the rise of Trumpism and its afterlife, and to the work of Paulo Freire and how his book Pedagogy of Hope can guide us in these dark times and help us produce critical and informed citizens. He argues that underlying the current climate of inequity, isolation, and social atomization (all exacerbated by the pandemic) is a crisis of education. Out of this comes the need for a pedagogy of resistance that is accessible to everyone, built around a vision of hope for an alternative society rooted in the ideals of justice, equality, and freedom.

Table of Contents:
Foreword: The Pedagogy Force of Fascism, Brad Evans (University of Bath, UK) Acknowledgements Introduction: Making Education Central to Politics in the Age of Pandemics Part I: The Crisis of Democracy and the deep roots of racial terror 1. The Dictatorship of Ignorance and the Crisis of the Public Imagination 2. America's Nazi Problem and the Plague of Violence 3. Trumpism and Its Afterlife Part II: The Crisis of Pedagogy 4. Fascist Culture and the Challenge to Critical Pedagogy, 5. Apartheid Pedagogy Part III: From Hope to Resistance in the Age of Plagues 6. Rethinking Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of Hope in Dark Times- 7. Towards a Pedagogy of Resistance References Index

About the Author :
Henry A. Giroux holds the Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. His books include On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd Edition (2020) and Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy (2021), both published by Bloomsbury.

Review :
Henry Giroux understands the depth of the crisis we now face in the United States and around the globe. In Pedagogy of Resistance, he writes about it all with the fire of a prophet and with the insight of a seasoned theorist. We all have to step up-especially educators-if democracy is to be saved. Educators have to devise new languages, tell different stories, and imagine new solidarities. We have to help forge a different way of being together shorn of the distortions of a way of life that thrives on ignorance and has turned us into monsters. Read every word of this book. Be unsettled. And when you finished the book, gather yourself, educators, and join the fight! Thinking critically and acting democratically are the most important weapons we have against fascism. No one knows this better than Henry Giroux, who has spent a lifetime thinking, teaching, writing, and speaking critical truth to power. But he also understands the power of hope and resistance, our capacity to defeat the fascist threat and build new democratic publics, because unlike so many “public intellectuals” Giroux refuses the barricades or the safety of the ivory tower. This book is his latest weapon and one of his best. The essence of fascism was captured by the commander of the fascist Spanish Legion: “Death to Intelligence: Viva Death.” Not long ago it was difficult to imagine that the fascist plague could reach our shores. No longer, as Henry Giroux demonstrates in painful detail in this searching and incisive account of what has been wrought by the assault on the social order and on reasoned discourse during the neoliberal era. The threats, he shows, are severe, and can be met, but not without sober assessment of the reality he skillfully depicts. Education has always been a target of authoritarian states that seek to change the ways populations think and behave. Henry Giroux's timely and urgent book offers a model of critical pedagogy to revitalize education as a site of democracy protection. In updating while building on Freire, Henry Giroux's Pedagogy of Resistance offers a searing critique of how the “pandemic” of manufactured ignorance" is pedagogically enabled. Giroux counters our contemporary condition with a mobilizing account of a radically democratic pedagogy of resistance. He identifies the pressing challenges we face collectively today, outlining all it will take to face them down and build a sustaining democratic counter. As timely a text as there is for our conjuncture, from one of the most critical analysts of the contemporary era. Henry Giroux is among the world's leading public intellectuals, one of the founders of critical pedagogy, the foremost thinker of education and politics, and a one of a kind social critic and cultural theorist who is always several steps ahead. Pedagogy of Resistance is many things at once: an indispensable guide to the politics of the present, a searing indictment of rising fascism, White supremacy, capitalism, and a largely complicit education system, a visionary and surprisingly hopeful manifesto for the transformative potential of education, and a highly original illumination offering new language, concepts and narratives for understanding and acting to expand the power of people. Pedagogy of Resistance is a must read, must teach book. The brilliant and prolific educational theorist and political commentator Henry Giroux's latest book is essential reading. Rooting our descent into 21st Century fascism in a “dictatorship of ignorance” imposed by corporate rule and neoliberal ideology, Giroux offers the antidote: a democratic pedagogical transformation that equips citizens to understand, resist, and overcome oppression.