The Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence

In The Burden of Conscience, Giroux confronts the insidious rise of fascism infiltrating today’s politics and education, alongside the suffocating silence that paralyzes our will to resist and speak truth to power. He decries the moral apathy in the face of the slaughter of children in Israel and the mass killing in Gaza, positioning this silence as part of a broader, ominous affliction of our age—the fusion of colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. He calls for a groundswell of resistance, urging a movement to reclaim education as a public good, where critical education becomes an expression of freedom, a crucible of literacy, liberation, and collective empowerment. Drawing on his own childhood, he intertwines the personal with the political, unearthing the complexities of class, whiteness, and race, showing that individual and collective actions must converge to dismantle oppressive systems. Finally, he argues that education is a powerful tool, giving us, in the words of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘the power to think the absent.’ Only through this awakening can a critical public consciousness emerge, sparking a multiracial working-class movement capable of challenging entrenched systems of oppression and bringing about true social transformation and radical democracy.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Politics of Emergency Time and the Crisis of Conscience 1. Youth and Memories of Hope in the Age of Disposability 2. Killing Children, the Burdens of Conscience, and the Israel-Hamas War 3. Blood in their Mouths: Lies, Violence, and Fascist Politics 4. The Right Wing’s Dirty War against History and Education 5. Bad Faith Liberalism and the Politics of False Equivalency 6. The Violence of Organized Forgetting 7. Silence Is Dangerous in the Current Age of Rising Fascism Conclusion 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 recent books include Insurrections (Bloomsbury, 2023), Pedagogy of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2022), Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy (Bloomsbury, 2021) and On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd Edition (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Review :
We wake up to volatile times as the world observes and ignores. The Burden of Conscience is not a subtle rebuke and reveal, it is a piercing cry: shattering and interrupting, naming what must be named, disquieting us all. No one does it better than Henry Giroux.