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Com a ascensão do fundamentalismo de mercado e o consequente colapso econômico e financeiro, a juventude de minorias pobres não são mais vistos como um investimento social, mas cada vez mais interpretados como um problema e um ônus social. Apanhados num poderoso complexo de controle de crime, a juventude é vista cada vez mais como mercadoria ou se vê submetida aos ditames de um sistema de justiça criminal em constante expansão. Ao ver seus protestos e reivindicações de educação de qualidade e a democracia radical como uma ameaça à ordem social, os jovens estão enfrentando crescentes níveis de violência de estado. O ataque à educação pública é um dos ataques mais perigosos lançados pelas forças da globalização e precisa ser desafiado pelos educadores públicos e a juventude

In the past ten years radical educators have developed several theories around the notions of reproduction and resistance. In this article, Henry Giroux critically analyzes the major positions of these theories, finding them inadequate as a foundation for a critical science of schooling. He concludes by outlining the directions for a new theory of resistance and schooling which contains an understanding of how power, resistance, and human agency can become central elements in the struggle for social justice in schools and in society. [This article is reprinted from "Harvard Educational Review's" 1983 Issue. For an introduction to the article, see EJ1399345.]

This paper is one of two which bring together leading educational researchers to consider some of the key challenges facing democracy and education during the twenty-first century, including rising social and economic inequality, political instability, and the existential threats of global pandemics and climate change. In this paper, key educational scholar-activists respond to the challenges and possibilities for democracy and education, with consideration of the importance of reimagining education as being for democracy. The questions asked in this paper have particular salience for educational leaders, who must be at the centre of any commitment to democratic education.

The United States is at a turning point in its history. Insurrection has become a dominant motif describing a country torn between the promises and ideals of democracy and an emergent authoritarianism that trades in lies, lawlessness, and a rebranded fascist politics. In this article, I analyze the contrasting visions, politics, and role of education that are central to both notions of insurrection. In the first instance, I argue that insurrectional authoritarianism is wedded to a fascist legacy that calls for racial purity, militarism, ultra-nationalism, and state terrorism. In the second instance, I analyze insurrectional democracy as a mode of resistance that has a long legacy in the battle for racial justice, economic equality, and a politics of inclusion. The article explores how both positions are motivated by particular understandings of education, agency, and the future. Within this distinctive historical moment, both participate in a landscape in which images, the social media, and the Internet play a decisive role in merging political education, power, and cultural politics. Both notions of insurrection infuse cultural politics with a specific language that narrate their visions and work to produce particular modes of agency, identifications, and social relations. At the core of the article is an analysis of how each narrative uses language and cultural politics to define their different notions of insurrection and how education and politics merge to create militarized identities operating in a warring environment in which the very categories of politics, education and democracy are on trial. I conclude that insurrectional authoritarianism has created the context for a civil war marked by a number of counter-revolutionary interventions in which ideas are married to violence and present a threat to democracy. I conclude with a call for an insurrectional democracy that makes education central to politics in order to produce an anti-capitalist consciousness as the basis for a mass movement in defense of socialist democracy.

After decades of a savage global capitalist nightmare both in the United States and around the globe, the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. The denial of the most basic elements of neoliberal fascism appears more difficult in the age of mass pandemics. Neoliberal violence now takes place under the assumption that it has escaped all control. How else to explain the collapse of public health systems underfunded for years as a result of neoliberal rule; the language of hate and violence aimed at people of color, especially under the former Trump administration; and the staggering increase in inequality in American society and its shameless counterpoint in massive increases in wealth among the ruling financial elite in an era of growing unemployment, and humans suffering in the age of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Immediate solutions such as defunding the police and improving community services are important, but they do not deal with the larger issue of eliminating a market-driven economic system structured in massive racial and economic inequalities. The renowned educator David Harvey is right in arguing that the "immediate task is nothing more nor less than the self-conscious construction of a new political framework for approaching the question of inequality [and racism], through a deep and profound critique of our economic and social system" (Harvey, 2020). This is a crisis in which different threads of oppression must be understood as part of the general crisis of capitalism. The various protests now evolving internationally at the popular level offer the promise of new global movements for the struggle for popular sovereignty and economic, racial, and social justice. Central to this struggle is the challenge of destroying the neoliberal global order. In the current moment, democracy may be under severe threat and appear frighteningly vulnerable, but with young people and others engaged in uprisings across the globe--inspired, energized, and marching in the streets--the future of a radical democracy is waiting to breathe again.

This article examines how the concept of freedom has been appropriated by the far right to impose a number of authoritarian policies designed to dismantle the critical functions of public and higher education. It explores, in particular, the ways in which Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has used an appeal to freedom to punish critics, wage a war on trans people, misrepresent the history of slavery, and impose a new version of McCarthyism on higher education. It challenges what it terms neoliberal and fascist notions of freedom by making clear that democracy and capitalism are incompatible, and that any viable notion of freedom must address not only personal and political rights but also economic rights. Freedom from domination must be matched by a freedom to live in a world marked by the principles of justice, equality, and dignity. There is no freedom in the midst of massive inequalities in wealth, power, and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henry Giroux begins this discussion by observing that he thinks there is a lot to be learned about what happens to higher education when authoritarians win elections and a liberal democracy morphs into something else. Giroux believes that under the regime of Donald Trump, higher education is under siege, and its stated purpose to produce the formative cultures necessary to support critical thinking, civic courage, expand the radical imagination, and nurture individual and social agency has been abandoned. He writes that at the same time, the growing crisis of higher education is expanding across the globe and increasingly echoes H. G. Wells' remark in 1920 that "History is becoming more and more a race between education and catastrophe." Giroux further argues that Trump's brand of authoritarianism has emerged at a time in which there is an over abundance of information, coupled with the rise of new digital and visual media whose cognitive models reinforce the assumption that reality be echoed rather than interrogated and critically comprehended. It is Giroux's contention is that many colleges and universities have been "McDonaldized" as knowledge is increasingly viewed as a commodity resulting in curricula that resemble a fast-food menu. The author concludes the article by saying that one of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students, and others is the need to address the question of what education should accomplish in a society at a historical moment when it is slipping into the dark night of authoritarianism. He asks educators what work they think is needed to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary in order for a robust democracy to thrive. In conclusion Giroux details several recommendations that could provide and alternative to some of the oppressive conditions now shaping higher education: (1) Higher education needs to reassert its mission as a public good in order to reclaim its egalitarian and democratic impulses; (2) Educators need to acknowledge and make good on the claim that a critically literate citizen is indispensable to a democracy; (3) Higher education needs to be viewed as a right, as it is in many countries such as Germany, France, Norway, Finland, and Brazil, rather than a privilege for a limited few, as it is in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom; (4) In a world driven by data, metrics, and the replacement of knowledge by the over abundance of information, educators need to enable students to engage in multiple literacies extending from print and visual culture to digital culture; (5) There is a plague haunting higher education, especially in the United States, which has become the model for its unjust treatment of faculty; and (6) Another serious challenge facing educators is the need to develop both a discourse of critique and possibility.