An Interview with Henry Giroux, Professor of Public Education at McMasters University
Henry Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has written and lectured extensively on the nature of public and higher education in the United States.
The Politic: How do you define education? When you discuss how education is going to create the next generation of active citizens, you place a lot of the onus on schools to create this change. Does your definition of education also include the family and society more generally?
Professor Giroux: My understanding of higher education is that it should be a democratic public sphere, a place that basically educates individuals not only to know something historically and to be able to think in terms sociologically and in terms of relations, but also to learn how to be responsible citizens, to have some understanding between the relationship of themselves, others, and the world, and basically what it means to be a critically engaged agent.
The key issue here for me around education is that if you don’t have a formative institution creating informed citizens, you don’t have a democracy. So I think education is a foundational place where students should be educated not just how to learn how to occupy jobs or be entrepreneurs, but also how to be actively engaged critical citizens.
The Politic: How should schools create more actively engaged and critical citizens?
Professor Giroux: There are a number of things. First off, students have to learn to think outside of disciplines. They have to find themselves under those pedagogical conditions where there imaginations can roam. I think increasingly we find that too many students are utterly specialized, have no sense of the larger connections they can make with the world, and seem to think knowledge is so isolated that you can actually survive in the world by only learning how to be an accountant.
I think that many students are not learning how to translate personal issues into larger public considerations. I think this question of translation is absolutely central to what students should be learning. I mean how do they take isolated issues and rather than privatize or personalize them, learn how to set them in a larger set of social, economic, and political conditions.
I think students need to learn to be theoretically rigorous. I think we need to understand theory less as a form of theoreticism in itself but basically as a resource. I get too many graduate students who just want to cite Foucault and that is what they do. Their papers are filled with citations. I think we are not teaching students enough about what theory is and what these intellectual traditions mean in terms of being able to use them in ways to address social problems that have some relevance to our lives
Among other things, students need to learn to take risks. I think they need to learn how to hold power accountable. I think they need to learn how to question in ways that are not terrifying for them. The assumption that anything that unsettles us lately is basically something they have to be wary of is antithetical to any notion of critical thinking.
I think we maybe need to move away from critical thinking to something called critical consciousness, meaning that I’m not really concerned about students being smart in the way I described – I think that’s important – but I also think they need to be socially responsible. They need to be able to learn that the issues of economic and political justice should not be separated from the issues they are talking about because it seems to me that if we want to reclaim the social sphere we need to suggest to students that they live in a An Interview with Henry Giroux, Professor of Public Education at McMasters University | The Politic:
