HENRY GIROUX [email]
Giroux holds a chair professorship at McMaster University in Canada at the English and Cultural Studies Department. His books include “Education and the Crisis of Public Values.”

He said today: “America is obsessed with violence and death, and this fixation not only provides profits for Hollywood, the defense industries, and the weapons industries, it also reproduces a culture of war and cruelty that has become central to America’s national identity — one that is as shameful as it is deadly to its children and others. The war on public school teachers and children has reached its tragic apogee with the brutal and incomprehensible killing of the young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School.”

Giroux just wrote the piece: “The Corporate War Against Teachers as Public Intellectuals in Dark Times” for Truthout.org, which states: “It is indeed ironic, in the unfolding nightmare in Newtown, that only in the midst of such a shocking tragedy are teachers celebrated in ways that justly acknowledge — albeit briefly and inadequately — the vital role they play every day in both protecting and educating our children. What is repressed in these jarring historical moments is that teachers have been under vicious and sustained attack by right-wing conservatives, religious fundamentalists and centrist Democrats since the beginning of the 1980s. …

“If the United States is to prevent its slide into a deeply violent and anti-democratic state, it will, among other things, be required fundamentally to rethink not merely the relationship between education and democracy, but also the very nature of teaching, the role of teachers as engaged citizens and public intellectuals, and the relationship between teaching and social responsibility.”