As students, teachers, and families get ready for the 2024-2025 school year, host Allen Ruff speaks with social critic and educator, Henry Giroux.

They talk about how colleges and universities cracked down on student dissent and protest last spring in response to Israel’s war on Palestine and US universities’ complicity in that violence. Some students will arrive on campuses this fall and find that their ability to demonstrate and protest is more limited and potentially criminalized.

With this new reality in mind, Giroux and Ruff decipher the reactionary trend to discipline and punish, and Girioux says we can see the repressive state apparatus at work in the policing of students and faculty protestors. 

Giroux says that young people understand that domination is economic, intellectual, and pedagogical. And he adds that educational institutions are crucial sites of struggle within democracy and they should be defended. He says that educators should be given more power and that students shouldn’t be treated as passive receivers in the education system. 

Henry Giroux is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic who has authored or co-authored over 65 books. He is McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest and the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy.

The post Back to School with Henry Giroux appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.