Plan:

The United States Supreme Court should declare compulsory education as

unconstitutional.
- We’d like to clarify that this affirmative in no way advocates for getting rid
of schools, rather we argue that forced schooling and forced learning only
causes issues.
 Advantage 1: Biopower
Compulsory education forces children to accept whatever is thrown their
way, brainwashing them to believe that there are predetermined roles for
them.
Gaile S. Cannella 99 Texas A&M University, College Station, USA, The Scientific Discourse of
Education: predetermining the lives of others – Foucault, education, and children,
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/ciec.2000.1.1.6, 6-29-2017

The acceptance of the scientific discourse of education has lead to the emergence of forms of
knowledge and ‘experts’ in that knowledge who are by definition given exclusive rights to
speak and act. Even social constructivists have labeled particular forms of knowledge as more sophisticated, as more informed,
as not appropriate for those who are younger. The knowledges of particular groups/individuals are
excluded and labeled inferior to others, whether because of being younger, smaller, viewed as
having less experience or dependent, less well read, new to a field, and on and on. Reconstructions
of knowledge are excluded, as examples – knowledge as struggle, as ambiguous, as nonexistent, as undefinable. Certainly,
knowledge is not accepted from particular groups, especially children who have not reached adolescence. Thosewho are
often identified as the major stakeholders in educational discourse are given no voice, much less
equal partnership in the process. Have we involved them in our teacher education reform efforts? in our educational
renewal activities? in our conversations about democracy? We speak of educational reform and collaboration,
but that collaboration is only with those who are adults. As Foucault points out, ‘From the depths of
the Middle Ages, a man was mad if his speech could not be said to form part of the common
discourse of men’ (1972, p. 217). The appeal to reason within a discourse provides an additional compelling form of exclusion.
This oppositional principle, the claim to ‘reason versus folly,’ legitimates the labeling of discursive formations that do not fit the
assumptions of the particular discourse as null, invalid, without intellect, even as relativistic or worthless. The
claim to reason
and the denial of folly places human activity that does not fall within the realm of particular
discourse assumptions in a void, in a vacuum in which no one hears. Again, even within a critique of
education as Enlightenment/Modernist scientific discourse, with moves to democratize schooling, collaboration,
and educational renewal, children continue to be accepted as learners, thinkers, and changing human
beings who we must educate. To question this assumption is a professional death sentence, a commitment to the asylum of the
strange, the demented, and the trouble-maker

The power that we give the federal government from the school goes way
beyond just educational institutions
Deacon ’06 [Roger. Honorary Lecturer in education and Honorary Research Lecturer in
politics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. “Michel Foucault on education: a preliminary
theoretical overview”
http://www.sajournalofeducation.co.za/index.php/saje/article/viewFile/74/50]

The centuries-long shift from negative to positive features of discipline was of primary
importance in the establishment of schooling as a society-wide disciplinary
technology. It went hand in hand with the development of new educational
procedures and relays through which individual and collective subjects could be
managed, their contexts regulated, their capacities augmented, and their effects
channelled, including, • the development of new teaching methodologies; • the
application of new forms of micro-discipline; • the apportionment of time; • the
management of sexuality; • the manipulation of bodies; • the spread of lateral
controls; and • the production and extraction of knowledge and the reappraisal of
curricula and learning. The combination of an expanding school population and the
enhanced training of increasing numbers of teachers made possible a kind of 'moral
orthopedics' which over time slanted away from external vengeance and towards
internal amendment. Though cumbersome, these initial disciplinary tendencies also
contributed to the creation of a specialized time of schooling and the reconceptualization of
childhood; to a proliferation of new, especially sexual, anxieties about children, and the
reorganization of adult–child relationships; and to the rise of the idea of education as a science.
Schooling in itself had been a disciplinary response to the need to manage growing
populations; within the progressively discriminating space of the schoolroom the
productive regulation of large numbers of pupils also required new methodologies.
First the monitorial method, already tried and tested at medieval universities, gradually supplanted the traditional
one-on-one teacher–pupil relationship; this approach, in which a small number of older or more advanced pupils
were individually tutored by teachers and then tutored the other pupils, signalled a shift in pedagogical relations of
power by supplementing confinement with the moral and disciplinary 'relays' of increasing numbers of trained
teachers, support staff and pupil assistants. Later, the monitorial method was superseded by the 'simultaneous
method' (attributed, but not exclusive to, Jean-Baptiste de la Salle: see De la Salle, 1935) of direct group instruction by
a single teacher. Accompanying these new instructional methods was a 'micro-disciplinarization' of
schooling. Foucault referred to 'a judicial power within the school', in the sense that
the more or less simple transfer of knowledge from one person to another cannot be
disentangled from those authoritative processes which seek to instill discipline into
the moral fibres of its inmates and thus differentiate between them, their nature,
potentialities, levels, and values. Punishment in schools began to shift away from the
public, the spectacular and the physically violent, to the personal, the mundane and
the psychologically compelling, from 'threats or blows' to 'a cold and neglectful
countenance', in the words of John Locke (in Baskin, 1966:348; echoed by De la Salle in
Foucault, 1986:178), from external retribution to internal reform. The body, once
made to be tortured, became something to be trained and corrected, from the
gymnastics of handwriting to regimens of personal cleanliness: a new moral
orthopedics that was intended to fashion the future more than punish the past. The
school refined and modified the disciplinary time it inherited from the monasteries, enhancing its value and its
usefulness by adding it up and capitalizing it, dividing duration into successive or parallel segments, and serializing
these from the simple to the complex. Like other disciplinary institutions, the early modern school attempted to
exercise control over and responsibility for nearly all of its inmates' time, a principle rendered concrete by subsequent
concerted interventions in pre-, post- and home-schooling, vocational training, Sunday schools, extra-mural activities
and managed recreation, and taken to its logical conclusion in today's concept of lifelong learning. However,
time, even before it can be used productively, or made available for various tasks,
needs to be understood in a particular way, to exist in a particular format, and to be
invested in or possessed by particular people; it follows that disciplinary time also
made the specialized time of schooling possible in the first place. In the context of an
expanding population, declining infant mortality, increased longevity, differentiation
of domestic space, and a sharper demarcation between the public and the private,
childhood became a problem of survival to adulthood, not merely at birth. The new
conception of childhood was first framed negatively, in terms of protecting the innocent child
from the various dangers that might beset it, such as disease, ignorance, immorality, or adult
sexuality. Increasingly, however, it was also felt necessary to positively strengthen children by
developing their physiques, character, and reason (Ariès, 1962). In the midst of these new
anxieties about children, Foucault espied what he called a 'pedagogization of children's sex': at
home, parents, siblings, tutors, and servants, and at school, teachers and fellow pupils,
constituted in relation to the child potential sources of danger, contagion, perversion and bad
influence. Childhood sexuality was thus the premise around which great battles were fought in
the schools, and also the pretext for the reciprocal surveillance of, and the reorganization of the
relations between, parents, priests, police, pedagogues, and physicians (Foucault, 1981:110;
104). It consequently became more pressing, and more justifiable, to separate children from
adults, younger children from older children and middle class from lower class children, and for
certain categories of children to be 'rescued' from 'inappropriate' institutions like workhouses,
poorhouses, prisons, and guilds. Schools began to develop, first, functionally
differentiated spaces, and later, separate classrooms; and pupils were distributed
spatially and serially, not only according to progress, age, or level of achievement but
also character, cleanliness, even morality. Schools' putative control of all
aspects of existence extended well beyond the formal school gates,
fostering a whole margin of lateral controls which permitted the indirect supervision
of parents and families and, ultimately, society as a whole (Foucault, 1986:211).
Schooling taught not only punctuation, but also punctuality, and not only reading, but
also hygiene; it taught that learning should not only entail gratification but also
require chastisement. Schools also exercised what Foucault called 'epistemological
power' — a power to extract a knowledge of individuals from individuals — which
functioned in two ways. On the one hand, pupils' or teachers' personal understandings of and functional
adaptations to school mechanisms could be recorded, accumulated, and used to subject individuals in new ways; on
the other hand, epistemological power generates a kind of clinical knowledge, which underpins current discourses
from educational psychology through teacher appraisal to whole school evaluation, and out of which emerged the
idea of education as a science. Despite these scientific pretensions, the actual content of educational knowledge only
slowly divested itself of its classical, scholastic and overtly religious orientations, and struggled to establish itself
against local and popular knowledge. The influence of the scientific revolution — an emphasis on the direct practical
manipulation and study of objects — only belatedly came to secure its place in the curriculum, first alongside, but
ever after increasingly at the expense of, grammar and God.

The impact is sexual conformity

Allen 9 [Louisa. Faculty of Education, University of Auckland. “The 5 cm rule’: biopower,
sexuality and schooling”
https://www.academia.edu/6136933/The_5_cm_rule_biopower_sexuality_and_schooling]

A key aim in understanding the sexual culture of schooling was to identify and explore the
multifarious practices by which meanings about sexuality and student sexual subjectivities are
constituted. The research’s methodological underpinnings reflected sociological and post-
structural work that views school culture ‘as active in producing social relations that are
contextually specific and productive of social [sexual] identities’ (Kehily, 2002, pp. 5051). In
this body of literature schools are viewed as sites where sexual meanings and identities are seen
to be discursively produced on a daily basis (Epstein & Johnson, 1998; Epstein, O’Flynn, &
Telford, 2003; Kehily, 2002; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Rasmussen, Rofes, & Talburt, 2004). It was
envisaged that a ‘school’s sexual culture’ would not be internally consistent and manifest
differently in particular locations. For instance, the form of sexual culture generated within peer
groups may differ from messages about sexuality communicated in rules about student conduct.
While one reflects an ‘official’ and ‘sanctioned’ policy, the other may be more informal and
contingent upon peer group composition and individual identifications (i.e. single or mixed
gender, religious girls, ‘popular boys’, etc.). The complexity and contradictory nature of a
school’s sexual culture, and difficulty in capturing its discursive and material existence, meant
innovative research methods were required

Irregularity in teacher enforcement, coupled with uncertainties about ‘the 5 cm rule’s’

boundaries, meant the power of this rule was experienced ‘loosely’. For instance, because they
were not punished harshly for infringements and knew not all teachers enforced the rule,
students only adhered to it in specific conditions. This sense of agency is characteristic of
contemporary forms of biopower which imply a less repressive exercise of control
over the body. While appearing less ‘ponderous’ and ‘constant’, this form of biopower
was successful in producing subjected and practised student bodies with students
selfregulating their behaviour in specific conditions. Participants spoke of adhering to
this rule on occasions when they knew a teacher would not condone physical contact.
However, when they believed they were no longer subject to a policing gaze they
would resume the prohibited activity. Discussing the impossibility of enforcing ‘the 5
cm rule’, Debra demonstrates how students regulate their behaviour in accordance
with teacher surveillance: like people wouldn’t listen. Like you’d have a teacher telling
you to be five centimetres apart, like okay, stop holding hands and then once they’re
out of sight you just hold hands again. You can’t really stop it and it’s a bit too much to
ask of people, why does it even matter? If people are mature enough to be together
for a long amount of time, then surely they’re mature enough to like hold hands. (17
years, Pakeha/European, Kiwi College) It might be argued that such moments of
defiance are examples of students’ resistance to this form of biopower. While they
reveal young people’s agency this might also be seen as a product of biopower’s
operation. For Foucault, power’s productive capabilities mean that wherever it is
present so is the potential for resistance (Foucault, 1980, p. 13). This nature of power
enables young people to exercise agency with regards to ‘the 5 cm rule’. As the narratives from
participants in this study indicate, it does not however enable them to escape it.
The affirmative’s promotion of education allows the government to mold
young school children into their image of the “ideal” citizen
Graham 2007 [Linda J. Graham, “Revisioning the Centre: education reform and the “ideal”
citizen of the future”, Educational Philosophy and Theory, NM/ND/2007,
https://eprints.qut.edu.au/57609/1/%28Re%29Visioning_the_Centre_EPAT_2007.pdf] Accessed
6/27/17

The imperative of good supported by the impetus of coercion led to the expansion of social
institutions - prisons, facties, hospitals and schools - operating as sites for the exercise of
disciplinary power. Childhood, albeit considered predictive of adult pathology, was seen as
more amenable to cure. These two factors assured that ‘children were to become favoured
objects and targets’ (Rose, 1990, p. 132) in the will to know and govern individuals. As a result, schooling
became a privileged disciplinary site for the individualisation and socialisation of the child as a
desirable future citizen (Synott & Symes, 1995) and ever more sophisticated methods were
developed to know and master the school child. These methods - both technological and
discursive - operate as the ‘means of visualisation and techniques of inscription’ (Rose,
1990, p. 134) and are deployed within social institutions, such as the schooling system, to fix and
to know the individual ‘within a single common plane of sight’ (Rose, 1990, p. 132). As such,
schooling operates as a field of application for the inculcation of social and moral principles
(Synott & Symes, 1995), forming a net-like organisation in which relations of power become
exercised, (re)informed and strengthened (Foucault, 1980).

The intersection of these techniques of enunciation and visibility (Deleuze, 1992) construct a
pedagogical net which acts to capture, sort, spatialise and rehabilitate individual school
children (Graham, 2006). The pedagogical categorisation of difference creates disciplinary spaces into which individuals
become distributed through methods of examination that utilise ‘grids of specification’ (Foucault,
1972, p. 46) constituted by relative domains of knowledge; such as special education or
educational psychology. As Rose (1990, p. 134) argues, the emergence of the individual within the
field of knowledge came about ‘not through any abstract leap of the philosophical
imagination, but through the mundane operation of bureaucratic documentation’. Statistical
tallies of populations tabulating births, deaths, and marriages graduated to the complex of
aptitudes, disinclinations, areas of weakness, learning styles, processing speed, short-term
memory, spatial abilities, word recognition, sociometric statuses and so on – transforming the
work of the humble statistician into an enterprise of individualisation. In the modern
schooling institution, this new-found knowledge has come to be deployed palliatively
with repression only coming into play as a lateral effect (Foucault, 1975a), obscuring
the other work done in the name of schooling through those ignoble practices that
occur on ‘the underside of the law’ (Foucault, 1976, p. 93f in Marshall, 2001, p. 35). Whilst the discourse of
discipline is incongruent with the notion of autonomous freedom, this is disguised through the
seemingly benign notion of meritocracy and the ‘positing of a faculty of choice’ (Marshall, 2001, p.
295). This brings about the appearance of autonomy with the implication that we are masters
of our own destiny and hence, victims of our own folly. Arguably, these notions obscure the
conditions of our own production (Olssen, 2005) and how our subjectivity has been formed via
the constitutive pressure of technological and discursive forces.

These forces are heavily implicated in the practices of schooling. Instead of enabling access
to the promise of freedom inherent to the discourse of right, schooling aids to imprison
the soul by taking up the persuasive humanism of psychological discourse to construct the
school child as an autonomous individual who is imbued with a ‘faculty of choice’ (Marshall, 2001,
p. 295). However, the insertion of a capacity to “choose” brings with it an assertion of not only
choosing to but also choosing not to. It is to the trap within this notion that I now turn.

The education system is the hegemonic dominance of the freedom of the

students – it promotes acceptance of abusive status quo norms and turns
education into a factory producing robots to fit society’s model.
Coles 14 (Tait Coles is vice principal at Dixons City Academy in Bradford and an author
specializing in education, “Critical pedagogy: schools must equip students to challenge the
status quo”, The Guardian, 2/25/14, https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-
blog/2014/feb/25/critical-pedagogy-schools-students-challenge

He developed a structured curriculum to deliver this, which is now being advocated by an increasing number of schools
and academies in the UK. But Hirsch's "cultural literacy" is a hegemonic vision produced for and by the white
middle class to help maintain the social and economic status quo. It deliberately fails to
consider the values and beliefs of any other particular race, class or gender. Young people who
enter the educational system and don't conform to this vision are immediately disadvantaged
by virtue of their race, income or chromosomes. Moreover, teaching a prescribed "core knowledge" instills a
culture of conformity and an insipid, passive absorption of carefully selected knowledge among
young people. It doesn't encourage students to think critically about society – nor does it fire a
desire to challenge the views they are taught. Schools that adopt this method become nothing
more than pipelines producing robotic citizens, perpetuating the vision of a capitalist society and
consequently preventing social mobility. Social stagnation through education is epitomised by the recent influx of Teach First
practitioners. The narcissistic notion that we can help underprivileged students by providing them with teachers who are privileged
young graduates from elite institutions is a mistake. This outlook pays no attention to – and fails to value – the backgrounds and
identities of the students it intends to save. Rather it continues the problem by trying to inflict the values and beliefs of the
dominant social class on others. Teachers can't ignore the contexts, culture, histories and meanings that
students bring to their school. Working class students and other minority groups need an
education that prepares them with the knowledge of identifying the problems and conflicts in
their life and the skills to act on that knowledge so they can improve their current situations.
Now is the time for our schools to incite a desire in students to challenge the accepted social
truths purveyed by media and education. Schools must develop a commitment to civic courage and social
responsibility that ignites bravery in young people to realise they have the power and opportunity to challenge the status quo.
School leaders have a duty to promote learning that encourage students to question rather
than forcing teachers to lead drill-oriented, stimulus-and-response methodologies. Teachers must
awaken the passions of their students and teach the knowledge and skills needed to direct and sustain it. Students need the
freedom and encouragement to determine and discover who they are and to understand that
the system shouldn't define them – but rather give them the skills, knowledge and beliefs to understand that they can
set the agenda. Educators must be prepared to embrace a radical pedagogy and believe that each
school should be one of freedom that provokes students to fight against the corridors of power
and enforce equality for themselves and others. Critical pedagogy is the only way to achieve
this. The philosophy was first described by Paulo Freire and has since been developed by the likes of Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren
and Roger Simon. Critical pedagogy isn't a prescriptive set of practices – it's a continuous moral project that enables
young people to develop a social awareness of freedom. This pedagogy connects classroom learning with the
experiences, histories and resources that every student brings to their school. It allows students to understand that with knowledge
comes power; the power that can enable young people to do something differently in their moment in time and take positive and
constructive action. Education has the power to change social inequality by nurturing a generation with an educated mistrust of
everything that has been indoctrinated before. This educational stance is one that we must all strive for as the moral purpose of
education.

Continuation of the bloody track of neoliberalism gauruntees endless war,

racial violence, and sociological polarization. Democracy is a dwindling
light, and critical thought is being erased by the force of rugged
individualism. The alternative is a praxis of hope founded upon the
development of historical consciousness. Only centering pedagogical
spaces like debate can flip the switch on complacent apathy in favor of an
active ethos of resistance
Giroux 13 (Henry A., pronounced “j – eye – r - oh- cks”, “Hope in the age of looming
authoritarianism,” https://philosophersforchange.org/2013/12/17/hope-in-the-age-of-looming-
authoritarianism/)

In the current historical moment, the line between fate and destiny is difficult to draw. Dominant
power works
relentlessly through its major cultural apparatuses to hide, mischaracterize, or lampoon
resistance, dissent, and critically engaged social movements. This is done, in part, by sanitizing public
memory and erasing critical knowledge and oppositional struggles from newspapers, radio, television,
film, and all those cultural institutions that engage in systemic forms of education and memory work.
Historical consciousness has been transformed into uplifting narratives, box-office spectacles,
and life-style stories fit for the whitewashed world of the Disney musketeers. As Theodor W. Adorno
puts it, “The murdered are [now] cheated out of the single remaining thing that our powerlessness can offer them:
remembrance.”[1] The relentless activity of thoughtlessness–worship of celebrity culture, a cravenly mainstream
media, instrumentalism, militarism, or free-roaming individualism undermines crucial social bonds and expands
the alleged virtue of believing that thinking is a burden.

Civic engagement appears increasingly weakened, if not impotent, as a malignant form of casino
capitalism exercises ruthless power over the commanding institutions of society and everyday
existence, breathing new life into old clichés. Under casino capitalism, fantasy trumps logic, if not rationality. A
sucker is still born every minute and the house still wins. Looming dreams of riches and fame invariably descend
into disappointment, defeat, or addiction. Uncertainty and precariousness breed fear and
insecurity instead of much needed social reforms and a belief in a more just future. Austerity
policies function as a form of trickle-down-cruelty in which the poor are punished and the rich
rewarded.[2] Totalitarianism, once visible in its manifest evil, now hides in the shadow of a market logic
that insists that each individual deserves his or her fate, regardless of the larger structural forces that shape it.

Asavage market fundamentalism relentlessly denigrates public values, criminalizes social

problems, and produces a manufactured fatalism and culture of fear while waging a
fundamental assault upon the very conditions that make politics possible. Politics is now
sapped of its democratic vitality just as traces of authoritarianism have seeped deeply into the
economic and cultural structures of American life. As American society incorporates authoritarian elements of
the past into its dominating ideology, modes of governance, and policies, justice withers and it becomes increasingly
difficult for the American people to translate matters of civic literacy, social responsibility, and
the public good “back into the language of society.”[3]

Americans are increasingly inspired to think uncritically, disregard critical historical narratives, and
surrender to pedagogies of repression. Under the Bush-Obama administrations, American education has been
cleansed of any effort to produce students who have the power to think critically and imaginatively and is now preoccupied with
producing young people unaware and unwilling to fight for the right to decent employment, access to a good life, decent health
The organized culture of
care, social justice, and a future that does not mimic a corrosive and morally bankrupt present.
forgetting with its immense disimagination machines has ushered in a permanent revolution
marked by a massive project of distributing wealth upward, the militarization of the entire
social order, and an ongoing depoliticization of agency and politics itself. We no longer live in a
democracy, which, as Bill Moyers points out provides the formative culture and economic conditions that enable people “to
fully claim their moral and political agency.”[4] This disembodied form of politics is not merely about the erasure
of the language of public interests, informed argument, critical thinking, and the collapse of public
values, but a full-fledged attack on the institutions of civic society, the social contract, and democracy
itself. Under such circumstances, the United States has succumbed to forms of symbolic and institutional
violence that point to a deep seated hatred of democracy.

Under such circumstances, common sense displaces critical thinking, individual and social agency are emptied of
political substance, and a collectively engaged democratic politics appears irrelevant in the face of an unquestioned “moral”
authority that parades as destiny.[5] The language of stupidity replaces reason as scientific evidence is
disparaged or suppressed, thoughtful exchange gives way to emotional tirades, violence
becomes the primary means for solving problems, and anger is substituted for informed
arguments. Unsurprisingly, any viable sense of social responsibility disappears beyond the fortressed enclaves of ever more
sequestered lives while various ideological fundamentalists assert their judgements of the world with a certainty that brands
dissent, moral inquiry, and critical questioning as excessive and threatening. Instead of affirming the wisdom of Martin Luther King,
Jr., Robert Kennedy, Audre Lord, and other public intellectuals, Americans are inundated with the likes of Bill Gates, George Will,
Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and other anti-public commentators and pundits. Intellectuals
who have
sacrificed their jobs, bodies, and lives in order to alleviate the suffering of others have been
replaced by the new “celebrity heroes” drawn from a corrupt corporate and political culture that lives off the
suffering of others.

In the place of politically vibrant and intellectually energized public spheres, Americans suffer under the self-serving interests and
demands, if not downright colonization, of immensely powerful corporations and the entertainment industry, which offer up the
confessional spectacles of Dr. Phil, the televised shame culture of a host of TV programs, the increasing violence entrenched in
celluloid Hollywood spectacles, and the corporate values embedded in survival-of-the-fittest “reality” television shows. As society
is increasingly organized around shared fears, escalating insecurities, manufactured
uncertainties, and an intensified post-9/11 politics of terror, the institutions of government
appear to be immune to any checks on their power to render democratic politics both bankrupt and inoperable.

The language of the market now offers the primary index of what possibilities the future may hold while jingoistic
nationalism and racism register its apocalyptic underbelly. As a market economy becomes synonymous with a
market society, democracy becomes both the repressed scandal of neoliberalism and its ultimate fear.[6] In such a society,
cynicism replaces hope, public life collapses into the ever-encroaching domain of the private while social ills and human
suffering become more difficult to identify, understand, and engage critically. Zygmunt Bauman points out that, “the exit from
politics and withdrawal behind the fortified walls of the private” means not only that society has stopped
questioning itself, but also that those discourses, social relations, and public spaces in which people can speak,
exercise, and develop the capacities and skills necessary for critically encountering the world
atrophy and disappear.[7] The result is that “in our contemporary world, post 9/11, crisis and exception [have]
become routine, and war, deprivation, and [the machineries of death] intensify despite ever
denser networks of humanitarian aid and ever more rights legislation.”[8]

In addition, the depoliticizationof politics and the increasing transformation of the social state into the punishing state
have rendered possible the emergence of a new mode of authoritarianism in which the fusion of
power and violence increasingly permeates all aspects of government and everyday life.[9] This
mad violence creates an ever-intensifying cycle rendering citizens’ political activism dangerous,
if not criminal. On both the domestic and foreign fronts, violence is the most prominent feature of
dominant ideology, policies, and governance. Soldiers are idealized, violence becomes an
omniscient form of entertainment pumped endlessly into the culture, wars become the primary
organizing principle for shaping relations abroad, and a corrosive and deeply rooted pathology becomes not the
mark of a few individuals but of a society that, as Erich Fromm once pointed out, becomes entirely insane.[10] Hannah Arendt’s
“dark times” have arrived as the concentrated power of the corporate, financial, political, economic, and cultural
elite have
created a society which has become a breeding ground for psychic disturbances and a
pathology that has become normalized. Greed, inequality, and oppressive power relations have
generated the death of the collective democratic imagination.
Howard Zinn wrote in the early seventies that the “world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail
and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is
distributed in this country…in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth.”[11]
Zinn’s words are more prescient today than when he wrote them over forty years ago. As American society becomes more
militarized, civil liberties are under siege at all levels of government. Bush and Obama have participated in
illegal legalities instituting state torture and targeted assassinations, among other violations. At the local
level, police all over the country are expanding their powers going so far as to subject people to invasive
body searches, even when they had only been stopped for minor traffic violations. One man in New Mexico was stopped for failing
to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. On the baseless claim of harboring drugs, he was taken to a hospital and underwent,
without consent, 8 anal cavity searches, including a colonoscopy.[12] No drugs were found. When the police believe they have the
right to issue warrants that allow doctors to perform enemas and colonoscopies without consent and anyone can be seized for such
barbarous practices, domestic terrorism takes on a new and perilous meaning. Similarly, young people are
being arrested in record numbers in schools that have become holding centers for low income and minority youth.[13]

Growing inequality in wealth and income have destroyed any vestige of democracy in America.[14] Twenty individuals in the United
States, including the infamous Koch brothers, have a total net worth of over half a trillion dollars, about $26 billion each, while “4
out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least
parts of their lives.”[15] Over 40 percent of recent college graduates are living with their parents while mega corporations and
wealthy farmers get huge government subsidies. We blame the poor, homeless, unemployed, and recent graduates suffocating
under financial debt for their plight as if individual responsibility explains the ballooning gap in wealth, income, and power and the
growing state violence that supports it. Poor people end up in debtor jail for not paying parking tickets or their bills while the heads
of banks, hedge funds, and other financial services who engage in all manner of corruption and crime, swindling billions from the
public coffers are rarely prosecuted to the full extent of the law.[16]

The new global market tyranny has no language for promoting the social good, public well-being, and social responsibility over the
omniscient demands of self-interest, crippling the radical imagination with its relentless demands for instant pleasure, a compulsive
pursuit of materialism, and a Hobbesian belief in war-of-all-against-all ethic. Increasingly, the social and cultural landscapes of
America resemble the merging of malls and prisons. American
life suffers from the toxin of socially adrift
possessiveness, individualism and a debilitating notion of freedom and privatization. Both of
which feed into the rise of the surveillance and punishing state with its paranoiac visions of
absolute control of the commanding heights of power and its utter fear of those considered
disposable, excess, and capable of questioning authority.

Authoritarianism has a long shadow and refuses to simply disappear into the pages of a fixed and often forgotten
history. We are currently observing how its long and dynamic reach extends from the dictatorships of Latin America in the 1970s to
the current historical moment in the United States. We
witness its darkness in the market ideologies, modes
of disappearance, state sanctioned torture, kill lists, drone murders of innocent civilians, attacks
on civil liberties, prosecutions of whistle blowers, and the rise of a mass incarceration state that
now connects us to the horrors that took place in the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay from the 1960s to the 1990s. I
was reminded of this recently when I received a passionate and insightful letter from Dr. Adriana Pesci who offers this warning to
Americans by drawing on the horrors of the killing machine that fueled the military dictatorship in Argentina. She writes:

I have also noticed the ongoing creation, by people such as you, of a new language designed to counteract the offensive of the
neoliberal system. Latin America started going through this process some 15 years ago, and is still at it, at much human cost and
after a horrendous history of repression and torture that dates from some 35 or 40 years back. The centurions of the system are
very unimaginative and their responses are very predictable once you studied them for a while. This is how it was possible for many
left leaning Latin Americans to know by early 2003, and before the debacle of Abu Ghraib was made public, that the American
forces’ use of systematic torture in Iraq was sanctioned from the top down, and that there were no excesses or errors (“excess”,
“errors” were those same words used by the dictatorships throughout Latin America).

In the past few years, and because I follow the news regularly, I have noticed a slow but steady evolution of the United States
towards what I can only call a variation on a theme. It reminds me of my past as a very young person in Argentina, the same
methods, the same words, the same excuses. I wish I could warn those at risk. I wish to pass along what I know, because I have a
sense of foreboding. I would like to believe that our experiences can be used by others to make their suffering less, and I would like
to believe, that the language that was created to describe, denounce and punish what was done to us in the name of neoliberalism
and development is the patrimony of humankind and it is there to be used to defend ourselves from the attacks of a dehumanizing
system that would like to chew us, ground us to a pulp and spit us all.[17]

Historical consciousness matters because it illuminates, if not holds up to critical scrutiny, those forms of
tyranny and modes of authoritarianism that now parade as common sense, popular wisdom, or just
plain certainty. In this case, the American public will not repeat history as farce (as Marx once suggested) but as
a momentous act of systemic violence, suffering, and domestic warfare. If the act of critical translation is
crucial to a democratic politics, it faces a crisis of untold proportions in the United States. In part, this is because we are witnessing
the deadening reduction of the citizen to a consumer of services and goods which empties politics of substance by stripping
citizens of their political skills, offering up only individual solutions to social problems, and
dissolving all obligations and sense of responsibility for the other in an ethos of unchecked individualism and
a narrowly privatized linguistic universe. The logic of the commodity penetrates all aspects of life while the most important
The
questions driving society no longer seem concerned about matters of equity, social justice, and the fate of the common good.
most important choice now facing most people is no longer about living a life with dignity and
freedom, but facing the grim choice between survival and dying.
As the government deregulates and outsources key aspects of governance, turning over the provisions of collective insurance,
security, and care to private institutions and market-based forces, it undermines the social contract, while “the present retreat of
the state from the endorsement of social rights signals the falling apart of a community in its modern, ‘imagined’ yet institutionally
safeguarded incarnation.”[18] Moreover, as social institutions give way to machines of all-embracing surveillance and containment,
social provisions disappear, the
exclusionary logic of ethnic, racial, and religious divisions render more
individuals and groups disposable, excluded from public life – languishing away in prisons, dead-
end jobs, or the deepening pockets of poverty – and effectively prevented from engaging in
politics in any meaningful capacity. The spectres of human suffering, misfortune, and misery
caused by social problems are now replaced with the morally bankrupt neoliberal discourses of
personal safety and individual responsibility. At the same time, those who are considered “problems,” excess, or
disposable disappear into prisons and the bowels of the correctional system. The larger implications that gesture towards a new
authoritarianism are clear. Angela Davis captures this in her comment that “According to this logic the prison becomes a way of
disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent.”[19] The invisibility of
power feeds ignorance, if not complicity itself. Under such circumstances, politics seems to take place
elsewhere – in globalized regimes of power that are indifferent to traditional political geographies such as the nation state and
hostile to any notion of collective responsibility to address human suffering and social problems.

We live at a time in which the crisis of politics is inextricably connected to the crisis of ideas, education,
and agency. What must be remembered is that any viable politics or political culture can only emerge out of a determined
effort to provide the economic conditions, public spaces, pedagogical practices, and social relations in which individuals have the
time, motivation, and knowledge to engage in acts of translation that reject the privatization of the public sphere, the lure of ethno-
racial or religious purity, the emptying of democratic traditions, the crumbling of the language of commonality, and the
decoupling of critical education from the unfinished demands of a global democracy.

Young people, artists, intellectuals, educators, and workers both in the United States and globally are increasingly
addressing what it means politically and pedagogically to confront the impoverishment of public
discourse, the collapse of democratic values and commitments, the erosion of its public spheres, and the widely promoted
modes of citizenship that have more to do with forgetting than with critical learning. Collectively, they provide varied suggestions for
rescuing modes of critical agency and social grievances that have been abandoned or orphaned to the dictates of global
neoliberalism, a punishing state, and a systemic militarization of public life. In opposition to the attacks on democratic institutions,
values, and modes of governance, activists all over
the globe are offering an incisive language of analysis,
a renewed sense of political commitment, different democratic visions and a politics of
possibility.

Political exhaustion and impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the widely popular assumption that
there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs. Within the increasing corporatization of everyday life, market
values trump ethical considerations enabling the economically privileged and financial elite to retreat into the safe, privatized
enclaves of family, religion, and consumption. Those without the luxury of such choices pay a terrible price in the form of material
suffering and the emotional hardship and political disempowerment that are its constant companions. Even those who live in the
relative comfort of the middle classes must struggle with a poverty of time in an era in which the majority must work more than they
ever have to make ends meet. Moreover, in the face of the 2008 economic crisis caused by gangster financial service institutions
such as J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Barclay, and Merrill Lynch, among others, the middle class is
dissolving into the jaws of a death-machine that has robbed them of their homes, health care, jobs, and dignity.

The ruling elites have taken flight from any sense of social and ethical responsibility and their willing and active repression of
conscience has opened the door to new forms of authoritarianism in which the arrogance of corporate power finds its underside in a
hatred of all others that threaten its power. Some contemporary theorists suggest that politics
as a site of contestation,
critical exchange, and engagement is in a state of terminal arrest or has simply come to an end.
However, too little attention is paid to what it means to think through how the struggle over democracy is
inextricably linked to creating and sustaining public spheres where individuals can be engaged as
political agents equipped with the skills, capacities, and knowledge they need not only as
autonomous political agents, but also to believe that such struggles are worth taking up. The growth
of cynicism in American society may say less about the reputed apathy of the populace than about the bankruptcy of the old political
languages and the need for a new language and vision for clarifying intellectual, ethical, economic, and political projects, especially
as they work to reframe questions of agency, ethics, and meaning for a substantive democracy.

In opposition to the attacks on critical thought, engaged citizenship, the discourse of hope, and the erosion of “the public character
of spaces, relations, and institutions,”[20] young people, workers, intellectuals, artists, and environmentalists are once again taking
seriously Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s insistence “to hang on to intellectual and real freedom” and to insure that thinking
does not become “immune to the suggestion of the status quo,”[21] thus losing its “secure hold on possibility.”[22] Increasingly,
young people and others concerned about a substantive democracy are taking political stands;
they are becoming more willing to cross boundaries, join questions of understanding and power, and bring into being with passion
and conscience new ways of engaging with the world. In doing so, this diverse group of activists, intellectuals, and concerned global
citizens is intervening in the world on several registers.

Such groups, while in their infancy, are determined to unmask society’s most pernicious myths, restage
power in productive ways, rescue the promise of social agency from those places where it has been
denied, and further the ethical and political imperative to provide an accurate historical account
of the racial state and racial power. More and more, youth and others marginalized by race and class
are refusing the dominant scripts of official authority and the limitations they impose upon individual and social
agency. Progressives and oppositional groups are rethinking what it would mean to engage spaces of neglect and
human suffering such as schools, shelters, food banks, union halls, and other sites of potential
resistance as starting points from which to build unfamiliar, potential worlds of hope, learning, and struggle.
In the process of thinking seriously about structures of power, state formation, race, sexuality, technology, class, and pedagogy,
these new modes of resistance never substitute moral indignation for the hard work of
contributing to critical education and enabling people to expand the horizons of their own sense of agency and
collectively challenge structures of power.

From Québec and Athens to Paris and New York City, these
emerging collective movements bristle with a
deeply rooted refusal to serve up well-worn and obvious truths, reinforce existing relations of power, or bid
retreat to an official rendering of common sense that promotes “a corrosive and demoralizing silence.”[23] What emerges in these
distinct but politically allied voices is a pedagogy of disruption, critique, recovery, and possibility, one which recognizes that viable
politics cannot exist without will and awareness, and that critical education motivates and
provides a crucial foundation for understanding and intervening in the world. Freedom in this
discourse means learning how to think critically and act courageously; refusing to substitute empowering forms of education for
mind deadening training and numbing methods of memorizing data and test taking.

Collectively these emerging movements of resistance are developing an understanding of politics that demands not only a new
language but also necessitates a broader vision, sense of organization, and robust strategies that are both critical and visionary.
This commitment translates into a pedagogy and politics capable of illuminating the anti-
democratic forces and sites that threaten human life; at the same time, its visionary nature cracks open the
present to reveal new horizons, different futures, and the promise of a global democracy. And yet, under the reign of
casino capitalism, racist xenophobic nationalisms, and other anti-democratic forces, notions of
citizenship are increasingly privatized, commodified, or subject to various religious and ideological fundamentalisms
that feed a sense of powerlessness and disengagement from democratic struggles, if not politics itself. The culture of
cruelty is alive and well as casino capitalism presents misfortune as a weakness and the logic of the market instructs
individuals to rely on their own wits if they fall on hard times, especially since the state has washed its hands of any responsibility for
the fate of its citizens. Hope
is in the air, but it is crucial to recognize that the creeping
authoritarianism descending upon the United States will not give up power easily, if at all.
Consequently, an impatient patience proceeds slowly and persistently, developing the formative culture
necessary for feeding a radical imagination waiting to manifest itself concretely in a new vision, social movement, and fierce urgency
of struggle.

Hope, in this instance, is the precondition for individual and social struggle, involving the ongoing
practice of critical education in a wide variety of sites and the renewal of civic courage among citizens, residents, and
others who wish to address pressing social problems.[24] Hope says “no” to the totalizing and common sense
discourse of the neoliberal present; it contains an activating presence that opens current political
structures to critical scrutiny, affirms dissent, and pluralizes the possibilities of different futures.
In this sense, hope is a subversive force. In opposition to those who seek to turn hope into a new slogan or to punish and
dismiss efforts to look beyond the horizon of the given, young people and other activists are resurrecting a language of resistance
and the pedagogical condition necessary for providing a sense of opposition and engaged struggle. Clearly, hope
as a practice
of freedom is not an individual indulgence, but rather a crucial part of a broader politics that
acknowledges those social, economic, spiritual, and cultural conditions in the present that make certain kinds of agency and
democratic politics possible. It is a narrative that embodies the reality of struggles ahead and the recognition that in such struggles
there are moments of possibility, new worlds, different relationships, and more justice.
The philosopher Ernst Bloch provides essential theoretical insights into the importance of hope.[25] Bloch believes that hope
cannot be removed from the world and is not “something like nonsense or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the
sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it.”[26] As a discourse of critique and social
transformation, hope in Bloch’s view foregrounds
the crucial relationship between critical education
and political agency, on the one hand, and the concrete struggles needed to give substance to the
recognition that every present is incomplete, on the other.

Hope becomes political rather than Disney-like when it is anticipatory rather than messianic,
mobilizing rather than therapeutic, and revealing rather than romanticizing. The longing for a
more humane society in this instance does not collapse into a retreat from the world but emerges out of critical
and practical engagements with present behaviors, institutional formations, and everyday practices. Hope does
not ignore the multiplying dimensions of human suffering, exploitation, and social relations; on the contrary, it acknowledges the
If democracy is to once
need to sustain the “capacity to see the worst and offer more than that for our consideration.”[27]
again become a rallying cry for massive global struggles, hope has to become a political and
ethical referent, which shows us how to believe “that in this moment in our history we have something of great import to
accomplish by exercising an optimism of the intellect in order to open up ways of thinking that have for too long remained
foreclosed.”[28]

Hence, hope is more than a politics – it is also a practice that provides the foundation for
enabling human beings to learn about their potential as moral and civic agents. Hope is the
outcome of those pedagogical practices and struggles that draw upon public memory, dangerous
knowledge, and repressed lived experiences, while at the same time linking individual responsibility
with a progressive sense of social change. As a form of utopian longing, educated hope opens up
horizons of comparison by evoking not just different histories, but also different futures; at the
same time, it serves as “a major resource as the weapon against closure.”[29] Critical and educated
hope is a subversive force when it pluralizes politics by opening up a space for dissent, makes
authority accountable, and becomes an activating presence in promoting social transformation.