Class Casualties:
Disappearing Youth
in the Age of George W. Bush
Henry A. Giroux
Ironically, children are unsafe in public schools today not because of exposure to drugs and violence, but because they have lost their constitutional protections under the Fourth Amendment. —Randall Beger, 2002: 127
1.1
There is a war being waged in the United States. It is a war being waged
on the domestic front that feeds off the general decay of democratic politics
and reinforces what neoliberals are more than pleased to celebrate as
the death of the social. The enemy for conservative forces is "big
government." And yet, as Kevin Baker (2003) recently pointed out
in Harper's Magazine: "Since the advent of Reagan and the
current Republican hegemony, the federal government has by almost all
objective measures become larger, more intrusive, more coercive, less
accountable, and more deeply indebted than ever before. It has more weapons,
more soldiers, more police, more spies, more prisons" (38-39). But,
given that the current administration has such a massive government when
it comes to the military, law enforcement, deficit spending, control over
public schooling, etc., this is really a war against the welfare state
and the social contract itself—this is a war against the notion that everyone
should have access to decent education, health care, employment, and other
public services. The following quotes signal what is at stake in such
an unprecedented attack on the democratic social contract. The first quote
comes from Texas state representative, Debbie Riddle. The second comes
from Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and arguably
Washington's leading right-wing strategist.
Where did this idea come from
that everybody deserves free education,
free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow…from
Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.
My goal is to cut government in
half in twenty-five years, to get it
down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.
As these quotes suggest, Norquist
and his ilk target some parts of government for downsizing a little more
energetically than others. They are most concerned with dismantling the
parts of the public sector that serve the social and democratic needs
of the non-affluent majority of the American populace. The parts that
provide "free" service and welfare to the privileged and opulent minority
and dole out punishment to the poor are reserved from that great domestic
war tool—the budgetary axe. Hence, democracy has never appeared more fragile
and endangered in the United States than in this time of civic and political
crisis. This is especially true for young people. While a great deal has
been written about the budget busting costs of the invasion of Iraq and
the passing of new anti-terrorist laws in the name of "homeland security"
that make it easier to undermine those basic civil liberties that protect
individuals against invasive and potentially repressive government actions,
there is a thunderous silence on the part of many critics and academics
regarding the ongoing insecurity and injustice suffered by young people
in this country. As a result, the state is increasingly resorting to repression
and punitive social policies at home and abroad.
1.2
The "war" on working-class
youth and youth of color is evident not only in the disproportionate numbers
of such youth who provide the fodder for Bush's preventive war policy,
it is also evident in the silent war at home, especially since the Iraqi
war and the war against terrorism are being financed from cuts in domestic
funding on health care, children's education, and other public
services. The class and racial war being waged against young people is
most evident in the ways in which schools are being militarized with the
addition of armed guards, barbed-wired security fences, and "lock
down drills." As educators turn over their responsibility for school
safety to the police, the new security culture in public schools has turned
them into "learning prisons" (Chaddock, 1999: 15). It
would be a tragic mistake for those of us on the left either to separate
the war in Iraq from the many problems Americans, young people in particular,
face at home, or fail to recognize how war is being waged by this government
on multiple fronts.
1.3 Slavoj Zizek (2003) claims that the "true target of the 'war on terror' is American society itself—the disciplining of its emancipatory excesses" (28). He is partly right. The Bush "permanent war doctrine" is not just aimed at alleged terrorists or the 'excesses of democracy', but also against disposable populations in the homeland, whether they be young black men who inhabit our nation's jails or those unemployed workers who have been abandoned by the flight of capital, as well as those levels of the government that provide any semblance of a social contract for the people. The financing of the war in Iraq, buttressed by what Dick Cheney calls the concept of "never ending war," results not only in a bloated and obscene military budget but also economic and tax policies that are financially bankrupting the states, destroying public education, and plundering public services. These multiple attacks on the poor and much needed public services must be contested by an expanding political and social vision that refuses the cynicism and sense of powerlessness that accompanies the destruction of social goods, the corporatization of the media, the dismantling of workers' rights, and the incorporation of intellectuals. Against this totalitarian onslaught, progressives need a language of critique, possibility, and action—one that connects diverse struggles, uses theory as a resource, and defines politics as not merely critical but also as an intervention into public life. We need a language that relates the discourse of war to an attack on democracy at home and abroad, and we need to use that language in a way that captures the needs, desires, histories, and experiences that shape people's daily lives. Similarly, as democratic institutions are downsized and public goods are offered up for corporate plunder, those of us who take seriously the related issues of equality, human rights, justice, and freedom face the crucial challenge of formulating a notion of the political suitable for addressing the urgent problems of the 21st century—a politics that as Zygmunt Bauman (2002) argues "never stops criticizing the level of justice already achieved [while] seeking more justice and better justice" (54).
1.4 As
the wars abroad and at home are interrelated, this suggests that the concept
of war has taken a distinctly different turn in the new millennium. These
days, wars are rarely waged between nations. Instead, wars are more frequently
waged against drugs, terrorists, crime, immigrants, labor rights, and
a host of other open-ended referents that have become synonymous with
public disorder. War no longer needs to be ratified by congress since
it is now waged at various levels of government in diverse forms that
escape the need for official approval. War has become a permanent condition
adopted by a nation-state that is largely defined by its repressive functions
in the face of its refusal and increasing political powerlessness to regulate
corporate power, provide social investments for the populace, and guarantee
a measure of social freedom. As a permanent state of politics, war and
its accompanying culture of fear are now, in part, a response to the impotence
of public institutions to improve conditions of radical insecurity and
the threat of an uncertain future.
1.5 Wars
are almost always legitimated in order to make the world safe for "our
children's future" but the rhetoric belies how their future is often
denied by the acts of aggression put into place by a range of state agencies
and institutions that operate on a war footing. This would include the
horrible effects of the militarization of schools, the use of the criminal
justice system to redefine social issues such as poverty and homelessness
as criminal violations, and the consequential rise of a prison-industrial
complex as a way to contain disposable populations such as youth of color
who are poor and marginalized. Under the rubric of war, security, and
anti-terrorism, children are "disappeared" from the most basic
social spheres that once provided the conditions for a sense of agency
and possibility, as they are rhetorically excised from any discourse about
the future. What is so troubling about the current historical moment is
that youth no longer symbolize the future. And yet, any discourse about
the future has to begin with the issue of youth because more than any
other group they embody the projected dreams, desires, and commitment
of a society's obligations to the future. This echoes a classical principle
of modern democracy in which youth both symbolized society's responsibility
to the future and offered a measure of its progress. For most of this
century, Americans embraced as a defining feature of politics the idea
that all levels of government should assume a large measure of responsibility
for providing the resources, social provisions, security, and modes of
education that simultaneously offer young people a future and the possibility
of expanding the meaning and depth of a substantive democracy. In many
respects, youth not only registered symbolically the importance of modernity's
claim to progress, they also affirmed the centrality of the liberal, democratic
tradition of the social contract in which adult responsibility was mediated
through a willingness to fight for the rights of children, enact reforms
that invested in their future, and provide the educational conditions
necessary for them to make use of the freedoms they have while learning
how to be critical citizens. Within such a political project, democracy
was linked to the well-being of youth, and the status of how a society
imagined democracy and its future was contingent on how it viewed its
responsibility towards future generations.
1.6 Yet,
at the dawn of the new millennium it is not at all clear that we believe
any longer in youth, the future, or the social contract—even in its minimalist
version. Since the Reagan/Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, we have been
told that there is no such thing as society and, indeed, following that
nefarious pronouncement, 
institutions
committed to public welfare have been disappearing ever since. Rather
than being cherished as a symbol of the future, youth are now seen as
a threat to be feared and a problem to be contained. A seismic change
has taken place in which youth are now being framed as both a generation
of suspects and a threat to public life. If youth once symbolized the
moral necessity to address a range of social and economic ills, they are
now largely portrayed as the source of most of society's problems. Hence,
youth now constitute a crisis that has less to do with improving the future
than with denying it. A concern for children is the defining absence in
most dominant discourses about the future and the obligations this implies
for adult society. To witness the abdication of adult responsibility to
children, we need look no further than the current state of children in
America.
1.7
Instead of providing a decent education to poor young people, American
society offers them the growing potential of being incarcerated; buttressed
by the fact that the U.S. is one of the only countries in the world that
sentences minors to death and spends "three times more on each incarcerated
citizen than on each public school pupil" (Wokusch, 2002: 1). Instead
of guaranteeing them food, decent health care, and shelter, we serve them
more standardized tests; instead of providing them with vibrant public
spheres, we offer them a commercialized culture in which consumerism is
the only obligation of citizenship. But in the hard currency of human
suffering, children pay a heavy price in the richest democracy in the
world: 12.2 million children live below the poverty line, more than 16
million are at the low end of the income scale, and 9.2 million children
lack health insurance (Clemetson, 2003). On top of that, millions lack
affordable child care and decent early childhood education, in many states
more money is being spent on prison construction than on education, and
the infant mortality rate in the United States is the highest of any other
industrialized nation. New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert
(2003) reports that in Chicago "there are nearly 100,000 young people,
ages 16 to 24, who are out of work, out of school and all but out of hope….
Nationwide…the figure is a staggering 5.5 million and growing" (A35).
The magnitude of this crisis can be seen in the fact that in some cities,
such as the District of Columbia, the child poverty rate is as high as
45 percent (Childhood Poverty Research Brief 2, 2001). When
broken down along racial categories, the figures become even more despairing.
For example: "In 2000, the poverty rate for African Americans was
22 percent, basically double the rate for the entire nation….In Chicago
the poverty rate for blacks is 29.4 percent and only 8.2 for whites. The
poverty rate for black children is 40 percent, compared to 8 percent for
white kids" (Street, 2003).
1.8 While
the United States ranks first in military technology, military exports,
defense expenditures and the number of millionaires and billionaires,
it is ranked 18th among the advanced industrial nations in
the gap between rich and poor children, 12th in the percent
of children in poverty, 17th in the efforts to lift children
out of poverty, and 23rd in infant mortality.1
Economically, politically, and culturally the situation of youth in the
United States is intolerable and obscene. In his 2003 budget, Bush has
done something no other president has
done. He has pushed through an immense tax cut that largely benefits the
rich—estimated
at $3 trillion—in
the midst of a war whose cost down the road for future generations will
be staggering. The U.S. budget deficit for 2003 is already $290 billion
and the current national debt is $6.84 quadrillion and is estimated to
reach $9.3 quadrillion by 2008 (Carter, 2003). The war on Iraq is costing
about $4 billion a month and the Republican controlled congress has just
passed a bill authorizing an additional $87 billion to support the "war
against terrorism" being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same
time that the Bush administration is giving huge tax cuts to the rich,
it is cutting veterans programs by $6 billion, including money for disabilities
caused by war, and benefits in education health care for their kids. He
is also cutting $93 billion from Medicaid, making huge environmental cuts,
and whittling away a vast array of domestic programs that directly benefit
children. One of the most shameful cuts enacted in the federal budget
took place in December 2002 when Bush eliminated $300 million from a "federal
program that provides subsidies to poor families so they can heat their
homes in the winter" (Carter, 2003: 69).
1.9 Under
this insufferable climate of increased repression and misplaced priorities,
young people become the new casualties in an ongoing war against justice,
freedom, citizenship, and democracy and this can be seen in the images
this society provides of children in trouble. In a society that
appears to have turned its back on the young, what we are increasingly
witnessing on prime time media are images of children handcuffed, sitting
in adult courts before stern judges, facing murder charges. These images
are matched by endless films, videos, ads, documentaries, television programs,
and journalistic accounts in which urban youth—depicted largely as gang
bangers, drug dealers, and rapists—are portrayed as violent, dangerous,
and pathological. Or, when working-class youth are not being directly
demonized, television offers images of ruling-class youth in programs
such as "Born Rich," "Rich Girls," and "The Simple
Life," suggesting that they are the group with real problems, such
as coping with envy management and figuring out ways to "dispel the
voodoo of inherited wealth" (Garner, 2003: 29). Such images invoke
ruling-class youth as an unapologetic paean to class power—affirming the
privilege of class as a way of both offering a voyeuristic glimpse at
the rich while simultaneously dehumanizing those middle-class and poor
youth who can't run up $1000 bar tabs whenever they wish. In a society
where 59 percent of college students say they will eventually be millionaires,
the 
dominant
press provides enormous coverage to celebrities such as Paris Hilton,
a famous New York debutante, who, as reported in the media, "has
stood for the proposition that wealth comes with no obligations of tact,
taste or civic responsibility. For people who dream of someday putting
unearned wealth to poor use, Ms. Hilton has been a beacon" (Leland,
2003: ST1). In the age of Bush, class becomes less a metaphor for marking
the unjust inequities of class privilege than a way of celebrating wealth
and power and rubbing it in the face of the poor. This is the popular
culture version of the neoliberal view of the world now so popular among
neoconservatives and the ultra right whose policies reproduce and legitimize
a growing appeal to "tough love" which in reality is marked
by contempt for those who are impoverished, disenfranchised, or powerless.
This is class politics waged in the realm of popular culture with a vengeance.
1.10 No
longer seen as a crucial social investment for the future of a democratic
society, youth are now demonized by the popular media and derided by politicians
looking for quick-fix solutions to crime. A whole generation of youth
is being depicted as superpredators spiraling out of control. In a society
deeply troubled by their presence, youth prompts in the public imagination
a rhetoric of fear, control, and surveillance. The impact of such rhetoric
is made all the more visible with the 2002 Supreme Court decision upholding
the widespread use of random drug testing of public school students. Such
random drug testing of all junior and senior high school students who
desire to participate in extra-curricular activities registers a deep
distrust of students and furthers the notion that youth should be viewed
with suspicion and treated as potential criminals. Along with drug testing,
increasingly, school officials subject students to vehicle search policies
and unannounced weapons searches. In some schools, students have been
"stripped-searched by police officers to locate money missing from
a classroom" (Beger, 2002: 124). Police and drug-sniffing
dogs are now a common fixture in public schools as schools increasingly
resemble prisons, and students are treated like suspects who need
to be searched, tested, and observed under the watchful eye of
administrators who appear to have less interest in education than in policing.
In Biloxi, Mississippi surveillance cameras have been installed in all
of its 500 classrooms. The school administrators call this school
reform but none of them have asked the question about what they are actually
teaching kids when they are put under constant surveillance. The
not so hidden curriculum here is that kids can't be trusted. At the same
time, they are being educated to passively accept constant surveillance, one
of the conditions of a police state. It gets worse. Some schools are actually
using sting operations in which undercover agents who pretend to be students
are used to catch young people suspected of selling drugs or committing
any one of a number of school infractions. The consequences of such actions
are far reaching. As Beger (2002) points out:
Opponents of school-based sting operations say they not only create a climate of mistrust between students and police, but they also put innocent students at risk of wrongful arrest due to faulty tips and overzealous police work. When asked about his role in a recent undercover probe at a high school near Atlanta, a young-looking police officer who attended classes and went to parties with students replied: 'I knew I had to fit in, make kids trust me and then turn around and take them to jail'. (123)
Children have fewer rights than almost
any other group, and fewer institutions protecting these rights. Consequently,
their voices are almost completely absent from the debates, policies,
and legislative practices that are developed in order to meet their needs.
1.11 In
many suburban malls, working-class youth of color cannot even shop or
walk around without either appropriate identification cards or being accompanied
by their parents. Excluded from public spaces outside of schools that
once offered them the opportunity to hang out with relative security,
work with mentors in youth centers, and develop their own talents and
sense of self-worth, young people are forced to hang out in the streets.
There, they are increasingly subject to police surveillance, anti-gang
statutes, and curfew laws, especially in poor, urban neighborhoods. Gone
are the youth centers, city public parks, outdoor basketball courts, or
empty lots where kids can play stick ball. Play areas are now rented out
to the highest bidder and then "caged in by steel fences, wrought iron
gates, padlocks and razor ribbon wire" (Kelley, 1997: 44).
1.12 Liberals,
conservatives, corporate elites, and religious fundamentalists are waging
a war against those public spaces and laws that view children and youth
as an important social investment. Peter Cassidy (2003) argues that young
people are being subjected to forms of emotional violence and privacy
intrusions that were unimaginable twenty years ago, except for prison
inmates. He claims that
a veritable Kindergulag has been erected around schoolchildren, making them subject to arbitrary curfews, physical searches, arbitrarily applied profiling schemes, and...random, suspicionless, warrantless drug testing....If you're a kid in the U.S. today, martial law isn't a civics class lecture unit. It is a fact of life as the war on drugs, the war on violence, and a nearly hysterical emphasis on safety has come to excuse the infliction of every kind of humiliation upon the young. (3)
Youth have become the central site
onto which class and racial anxieties are projected. Their very presence
represents both the broken promises of capitalism in the age of
deregulation and downsizing and a collective fear of the consequences
wrought by systemic class inequalities and a culture of "infectious
greed" that has created a generation of unskilled and displaced youth
expelled from shrinking markets, blue collar jobs, and any viable hope
for the future. It is against this growing threat to basic freedom, democracy,
and youth that I want to address the related issues of democracy, zero
tolerance policies, and public schools.
Class/Race and the Politics of Punishment in Schools
2.1 When
the War on Poverty ran out of steam with the social and economic
crisis that emerged in the 1970s, there was a growing shift at all levels
of government from an emphasis on social investments to an emphasis on
public control, social containment, and the criminalization of social
problems. The criminalization of social issues—starting with President
Ronald Reagan's war on drugs,2
the privatization of the prison industry in the 1980s, escalating to the
war on immigrants in the early 1990s, and the rise of the prison-industrial
complex by the close of the decade—has
now become a part of everyday culture and provides a common referent point
that extends from governing prisons and regulating urban culture to running
schools. This is most evident in the emergence of zero tolerance laws
that have swept the nation since the 1980s, and gained full legislative
strength with the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act of 1994. Following the mandatory sentencing legislation and get-tough
policies associated with the "war on drugs," this bill calls
for a "three strikes and you're out" policy which puts repeat
offenders, including nonviolent offenders, in jail for life, regardless
of the seriousness of the crime. As is widely reported, the United States
is now the biggest jailer in the world. Between 1985 and 2002 the prison
population grew from 744,206 to 2.1 million (approaching the combined
populations of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana), and prison budgets jumped
from $7 billion in 1980 to $40 billion in 2000 (Delgado, 2000; Vicini,
2003).3 As Sanho Tree (2003) points out:
With more than 2 million people behind bars (there are only 8 million prisoners in the entire world), the United States—with one-twenty-second of the world's population—has one-quarter of the planet’s prisoners. We operate the largest penal system in the world, and approximately one quarter of all our prisoners (nearly half a million people) are there for nonviolent drug offenses. (5)
In addition, we are adding 700 inmates
every week of the year (Vinci, 2003). Yet, even as the crime rate plummets
dramatically, more people, especially people of color, are being arrested,
harassed, punished, and put in jail.4
Of the two million people behind bars, 70 percent of the inmates are people
of color; 50 percent are African Americans and 17 percent are Latino/as
(Barsamian, 2001).
2.2 A
Justice Department report points out and that on any given day in this
country "more than a third of the young African-American men aged
18-34 in some of our major cities are either in prison or under some form
of criminal justice supervision" (Donziger, 1996: 101). The
same department reported in April of 2000 that "black youth are forty-eight
times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison for drug
offenses" (Press, 2000: 55). When poor youth of color are not being
warehoused in dilapidated schools or incarcerated they are being aggressively
recruited by the military to fight the war in Iraq. For example, Carl
Chery (2003) recently reported:
With help from The Source magazine, the U.S. military is targeting hip-hop fans with custom-made Hummers, throwback jerseys and trucker hats. The yellow Hummer, spray-painted with two black men in military uniform, is the vehicle of choice for the U.S. Army's 'Take It to the Streets Campaign'—a sponsored mission aimed at recruiting young African Americans into the military ranks. (1)
It seems that the Army has discovered
hip-hop and urban culture and rather than listening to the searing indictments
of poverty, joblessness, and despair that is one of its central messages,
the Army recruiters appeal to its most commodified elements by letting
the "potential recruits hang out in the Hummer, where they can pep
the sound system or watch recruitment videos" (Chery, 2003: 1). Of
course, they won't view any videos of Hummers being blown up in the war-torn
streets of Baghdad.
2.3 Domestic
militarization in the form of zero tolerance laws, in this instance, functions
not only to contain "minority populations," deprive them of
their elector rights (13 percent of all black men in the U.S. have lost
their right to vote) (Street, 2001), and provide new sources of revenue
for a system that "evokes the convict leasing system of the Old South"
(Featherstone, 2000: 81), it also actively promotes and legitimates retrograde
and repressive social policies. For example, an increasing number of states,
including California and New York, are now spending more on prison construction
than on higher education (Lotke, 1996). In addition, School Resource
Officers—armed and unarmed enforcement officials who implement safety
and security measures in schools—are one of the fastest growing segments
of law enforcement in the United States (Beger, 2002).
2.4 What
is one to make of social policies that portray youth, especially poor
youth of color, as a generation of suspects? What are we to make of a
social order—headed by a pro-gun, pro-capital punishment, and pro-big
business conservative such as George W. Bush—whose priorities suggest
to urban youth that American society is willing to invest more in sending
them to jail than in providing them with high quality schools and a decent
education? How does a society justify housing poor students in schools
that are unsafe, decaying, and with little or no extra curricular activities
while at the same time it spends five times more annually—as high as $20,000
in many suburban schools—on each middle-class student, housing them in
schools with Olympic swimming pools, the latest computer technology, and
well cared for buildings and grounds? What message is being sent to young
people when in a state such as New York "more Blacks entered prison
just for drug offenses than graduated from the state's massive university
system with undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees combined in the
1990s" (Street, 2001: 26)? What message is being sent to youth when
as federal deficits are soaring, the Bush administration provides tax
cuts for the rich—in one instance $114 billion in corporate tax concessions—while
at the same time children face drastic cuts in education and health aid,
as well as other massive cuts in domestic programs such as job training
and summer employment opportunities? In this instance, the culture of
domestic militarization, with its policies of containment, brutalization,
and punishment become more valued to the dominant social order than any
consideration of what it means for a society to expand and strengthen
the mechanisms and freedoms of a fully realized democracy.5
2.5 Zero
tolerance policies have been especially cruel in the treatment of juvenile
offenders.6
Rather than attempting to work with youth and make an investment in their
psychological, economic, and social well being, a growing number of cities
are passing sweep laws—curfews
and bans against loitering and cruising—designed
not only to keep youth off the streets, but also to make it easier to
criminalize their behavior. For example, within the last decade "45
states...have passed or amended legislation making it easier to prosecute
juveniles as adults" and in some states "prosecutors can bump
a juvenile case into adult court at their own discretion" (Talbot,
2000: 42). In Kansas and Vermont, a 10-year-old child can be tried in
adult court. A particularly harsh example of the draconian measures being
used against young people can be seen in the passing of Proposition
21 in California. This law makes it easier for prosecutors to try
teens, fourteen and older, in adult court if they are accused of a felony.
These youth would automatically be put in adult prison and be given lengthy
mandated sentences. The overall goal of the law is to largely eliminate
intervention programs, increase the number of youth in prisons, especially
minority youth, and keep them there for longer periods of time. Moreover,
the law is at odds with a number of studies that indicate that putting
youth in jail with adults both increases recidivism and poses a grave
danger to young offenders who, as a Columbia University study suggested,
are "five times as likely to be raped, twice as likely to be beaten,
and eight times as likely to commit suicide than adults in the adult prison
system" (Nieves, 2000: A1, A15).
2.6 Paradoxically,
the moral panic against crime and now terrorism that increasingly feeds
the calls for punishment and revenge rather than rehabilitation programs
for young people exists in conjunction with the disturbing fact that the
United States is now one of only seven countries in the world that permits
the death penalty for juveniles (Rimer & Bonner, 2000). In many states,
youth cannot get a tattoo, join the military, get their ears pierced,
or get a marriage license until they are 18, but youth as young as ten
years old can be jailed as adults and condemned to death in some states.
The prize-winning novelist Ann Patchett (2002) suggested in The New
York Times that perhaps the problem is that "as Americans, we
no longer have any idea what constitutes a child" (17). This strikes
me as ludicrous. The ongoing attacks on children's rights, the endless
commercialization of youth, the downsizing of children's services, and
the increasing incarceration of young
people suggest more than confusion. In actuality, such policies suggest
that, at best, adult society no longer cares about children and, at worse,
views them with scorn and fear.
2.7 As
the state is downsized and basic social services dry up, containment policies
become the principle means to discipline working-class youth and restrict
their ability to think critically and engage in oppositional practices.
At the academic level, this translates into imposing accountability schemes
on schools that are really about enforcing high-stakes testing policies.
Such approaches deskill teachers, reduce learning to the lowest common
denominator, undermine the possibility of critical learning, and prepare
young people to be docile. Schools increasingly resemble other weakened
public spheres as they cut back on trained psychologists, school nurses,
programs such as music, art, athletics, and valuable after-school activities.
Jesse Jackson (2000) argues that under such circumstances, schools not
only fail to provide students with a well-rounded education, they often
"bring in the police, [and] the school gets turned into a feeder
system for the penal system" (16). Marginalized students learn quickly
that they are surplus populations and that the journey from home to school
no longer means they will next move into a job; on the contrary, school
now becomes a training ground for their "graduation" into containment
centers such as prisons and jails that keep them out of sight, patrolled,
and monitored so as to prevent them from becoming a social canker or political
liability to those white and middle-class populations concerned about
their own safety. Schools increasingly function as zoning mechanisms to
separate students marginalized by class and color and as such these institutions
are now modeled after prisons. This follows the argument of David Garland
(2001), who points out that, "Large-scale incarceration functions
as a mode of economic and social placement, a zoning mechanism that segregates
those populations rejected by the depleted institutions of family, work,
and welfare and places them behind the scenes of social life" (B4).
Schools Emulating Prison Policies
3.1 Across
the nation, school districts are lining up to embrace zero tolerance policies.
According to the United States Department of Education, about 90 percent
of schools systems nationwide have implemented such policies in order
to deal with either violence or threats (Zernike, 2001). Emulating state
and federal laws passed in the1990s, such as the federal Gun-Free Schools
Act of 1994, that were based on mandatory sentencing and "three
strikes and you're out" policies, many educators first invoked zero
tolerance rules against those kids who brought guns to schools. Schools
soon broadened the policy and it now includes a gamut of student 
misbehavior
ranging from using or circulating drugs, harboring a weapon, to threatening
other students—all broadly conceived. Under zero tolerance policies, forms
of punishment that were once applied to adults now apply to first graders.
Originally aimed at "students who misbehave intentionally, the law
now applies to those who misbehave as a result of emotional problems or
other disabilities" as well (American Bar Association, 2003: 3).
3.2 Unfortunately,
any sense of perspective or guarantee of rights seems lost, as school
systems across the country clamor for metal detectors, armed guards, high-tech
surveillance systems, see-through knapsacks, and, in some cases, armed
teachers. Some school systems are investing in new software in order to
"profile" students who might exhibit criminal behavior (Moore,
2000). Overzealous laws relieve educators of exercising deliberation and
critical judgment as more and more young people are either suspended or
expelled from school, often for ludicrous reasons. For example, two Virginia
fifth-graders who allegedly put soap in their teacher's drinking water
were charged with a felony (Goodman, 2000). A 12-year-old boy in Louisiana
who was diagnosed with a hyperactive disorder was suspended for two days
after telling his friends in a food line "I’m gonna get you!"
if they ate the all the potatoes. The police then charged the boy with
making "terroristic threats" and he was incarcerated for two
weeks while awaiting trial. A 14-year-old disabled student in Palm Beach,
Florida was referred to the police by the school principal for allegedly
stealing $2.00 from another student. He was then charged with strong-armed-robbery,
and held for six weeks in an adult jail, even though this was his first
arrest.7
There is the absurd case of five students in Mississippi who were suspended
and criminally charged for throwing peanuts at each other on a school
bus (Beger, 2002). There is also the equally revealing example of a student
brought up on a drug charge because he gave another youth two lemon cough
drops.
3.3 As
Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman (2000) points out, zero tolerance
does more than offer a simple solution to a complex problem; it has become
a code word for a "quick and dirty way of kicking kids out"
of school rather than creating safe environments for them (8). For example,
the Denver Rocky Mountain News reported in June of 1999 that "partly
as a result of such rigor in enforcing Colorado's zero tolerance law,
the number of kids kicked out of public schools has skyrocketed since
1993—from 437 before the law to nearly 2,000 in the 1996-1997 school year"
(38A). In Chicago, the widespread adoption of zero tolerance policies
in 1994 resulted in a 51 percent increase in student suspensions for the
next four years, and a 3000 percent increase in expulsions, jumping "from
21 in 1994-1995 to 668" the following year (Michie, 2000: 24). In Connecticut,
students are being pushed out of schools like never before. For example:
The number of suspensions jumped about 90 percent from 1998-1999 to 2000-2001. In 2000-2001, 90,559 children were suspended from schools around the state, up from 57,626 two years earlier. (Gordon, 2003: 14CN)
Within such a climate of disdain and intolerance, expelling students does more than pose a threat to innocent kids, it also suggests that local school boards are refusing to do the hard work of exercising critical judgment, trying to understand what conditions undermine school safety, and providing reasonable support services for all students—and viable alternatives for the troubled ones. Moreover, the No Child Left Behind program, with its investment in high-stakes testing puts even more pressure on schools either to push underachieving students out or do nothing to prevent them from leaving school. Raising test scores is now the major goal of educational reformers and it puts a huge amount of pressure on principals who are expected to reach district goals. Such pressure played an important role in the Houston School System, held up as a model by President George W. Bush, which not only does nothing to prevent students from leaving school but also falsified dropout data in order for principals to get financial bonuses and meet district demands. Tamar Lewin and Jennifer Medina (2003) reported in The New York Times that large number of students who are struggling academically are being pushed out of New York City schools in order to not "tarnish the schools' statistics by failing to graduate on time" (A1). As the criminalization of young people finds its way into the classroom, it becomes easier for school administrators to punish students rather than listen to them or, for that matter, to work with parents, community programs, religious organizations, and social service agencies.8 Even though zero tolerance policies clog up the courts and put additional pressure on an already overburdened juvenile justice system, educators appear to have few qualms about implementing them. And the results are far from inconsequential for the students themselves.
3.4 Most
insidiously, zero tolerance policies and laws appear to be well-tailored
for mobilizing racialized codes and race-based moral panics that portray
black and brown urban youth as a frightening and violent threat to the
safety of 'decent' Americans. Not only do most of the high profile zero
tolerance cases involve African-American students, but such policies also
reinforce the racial inequities that plague school systems across the
country. For example, the New York Times has reported on a number
of studies illustrating "that black students in public schools across
the country are far more likely than whites to be suspended or expelled,
and far less likely to be in gifted or advanced placement classes"
(Lewin, 2000: A14). Even in a city such as San Francisco, considered a
bastion of liberalism, African-American students pay a far greater price
for zero tolerance policies. Libero Della Piana (2000) reports that "According
to data collected by Justice Matters, a San Francisco agency advocating
equity in education, African Americans make up 52 percent of all suspended
students in the district—far in excess of the 16 percent of [African-American
youth in] the general population" (A21). Marilyn Elias (2000) reported
in an issue of USA Today that, "In 1998, the first year national
expulsion figures were gathered, 31 percent of kids expelled were black,
but blacks made up only 17 percent of the students in public schools"
(9D).
3.5 Feeding
on moral panic and popular fear, zero tolerance policies not only turn
schools into an adjunct of the criminal justice system, they also further
rationalize misplaced legislative priorities. And that has profound social
costs. Instead of investing in early-childhood programs, repairing deteriorating
school buildings, or hiring more qualified teachers, schools now spend
millions of dollars to upgrade security, even when such a fortress mentality
defines the simplest test of common sense. As mentioned earlier, school
administrators in Biloxi, Mississippi decided to invest $2 million to
install 800 cameras in 11 schools rather
than use that money to hire more teachers to reduce class size, provide
more books for the library, fund extracurricular programs or a host of
other useful school improvements (Dillon 2003). Young people are quickly
realizing that schools have more in common with military boot camps and
prisons than they do with other institutions in American society. In addition,
as schools abandon their role as democratic public spheres and are literally
"fenced off" from the communities that surround them, they lose
their ability to become anything other than spaces of containment and
control. In this context, discipline and training replace education for
all but the privileged as schools increasingly take on an uncanny resemblance
to oversized police precincts, tragically disconnected both from the students
who inhabit them and the communities that give meaning to their historical
experiences and daily lives. As schools become militarized they lose their
ability to provide students with the skills to cope with human differences,
uncertainty, and the various symbolic and institutional forces that undermine
political agency and democratic public life itself.
Schooling and the Crisis of Public Life
4.1 Zero
tolerance policies suggest a dangerous imbalance between democratic values
and the culture of fear. Instead of security, zero tolerance policies
in the schools contribute to a growing climate of bigotry, hypocrisy,
and intolerance that turns a generation of youth into criminal suspects.
In spite of what we are told by the current Bush administration, conservative
educators, the religious right, and the cheerleaders of corporate culture,
the greatest threat to education in this country does not come from disruptive
students, the absence of lock-down safety measures, and get tough school
polices. Nor are young people threatened by the alleged decline of academic
standards, the absence of privatized choice schemes, or the lack of rigid
testing measures. On the contrary, the greatest threat to young people
comes from a society that refuses to view them as a social investment,
that consigns 13.5 million children to live in poverty, reduces critical
learning to massive testing programs, refuses to pay teachers an adequate
salary, promotes policies that eliminate most crucial health and public
services, and defines masculinity through the degrading celebration of
a gun culture, extreme sports, and the spectacles of violence that permeate
corporate controlled media industries. It also comes from a society that
values security more than basic rights, wages an assault on all non-market
values and public goods, and engages in a ruthless transfer of wealth
from the poor and middle class to the rich and privileged.
4.2 We
live in a society in which a culture of punishment, greed, and intolerance
has replaced a culture of social responsibility and compassion. We have
increasingly become a society in which issues regarding persistent poverty,
inadequate health care, racial apartheid in the inner cities, and the
growing inequalities between the rich and the poor have been either removed
from the inventory of public discourse and progressive social policy or
factored into talk-show spectacles. This is evident in ongoing attempts
by many liberals and conservatives to turn commercial-free public education
over to market forces, dismantle traditional social provisions of
the welfare state, turn over all vestiges of the health care system to
private interests, and mortgage social security to the whims of the stock
market. Emptied of any substantial content, democracy appears imperiled
as individuals are unable to translate their privately suffered misery
into public concerns and collective action. The result is not only silence
and indifference, but the elimination of those public spaces that reveal
the rough edges of social order, disrupt consensus, and point to the need
for modes of education and knowledge that link learning to the
conditions necessary for developing democratic forms of political agency
and civic struggle. This is a society in which biographical solutions
are substituted for systemic contradictions, and as Ulrich Beck (1995)
points out, institutions "for overcoming problems" are converted
into "institutions for causing problems" (7).
4.3 Within
such a climate of harsh discipline and moral indifference, it is easier
to put young people in jail than to provide the education, services, and
care they need to face the problems of a complex and demanding society.9
Conservative critics such as Abigail Thernstrom (2003) actually reinforce
the ongoing criminalization of school policy, the expansion of police
power in schools, and the vanishing rights of children by arguing that
zero tolerance policies are especially useful for minority and poor children.
Thernstrom's comments on educational reform not only expand zero tolerance
policies to include the most trivial forms of transgression, but they
also suggest a barely concealed, racially-coded standard for punishing
students. She writes: "They need schools where there is zero tolerance
for violence, erratic or tardy attendance, inappropriate dress, late or
incomplete homework, incivility toward staff and other students, messy
desks and halls, trash on the floor and other signs of disorder"
(B17). The notion that children should be viewed as a crucial social resource
who present for any healthy society important ethical and political considerations
about the quality of public life, the allocation of social provisions,
and the role of the state as a guardian of public interests appears to
be lost in a society that refuses to invest in its youth as part of a
broader commitment to a fully realized democracy. As the social order
becomes more privatized and militarized, we increasingly face the problem
of losing a generation of young people to a system of increasing intolerance,
repression, and moral indifference.
4.4 The
growing attack on working-class youth, youth of color, and public education
in American society may say less about the reputed apathy of the populace
than it might about the bankruptcy of the old political languages and
the need for a new language and vision for expanding and deepening the
meaning of democracy and making the education of youth central to such
a project. Made over in the image of corporate culture, schools are no
longer valued as a public good but as a private interest; hence, the appeal
of such schools is less their capacity to educate students according to
the demands of critical citizenship than it is about enabling students
to master the requirements of a market-driven economy. This is not education
but training. Under these circumstances, many students increasingly
find themselves in schools that lack any language for relating the self
to public life, social responsibility, or the imperatives of democratic
life. In this instance, democratic education with its emphasis on social
justice, respect for others, critical inquiry, equality, freedom, civic
courage, and concern for the collective good is suppressed and replaced
by an excessive emphasis on the language of privatization, individualism,
self-interest, and brutal competitiveness. Lost in this commercial and
privatizing discourse of schooling is any notion of democratic community
or models of leadership capable of raising questions about what public
schools should accomplish in a democracy and why under certain circumstances,
they fail; or for that matter, why public schools have increasingly adapted
policies that bear a close resemblance to how prisons are run.
4.5 Zero
tolerance has become a metaphor for hollowing out the state and expanding
the forces of domestic militarization, reducing democracy to consumerism,
and replacing an ethic of mutual aid with an appeal to excessive individualism
and social indifference.10
Within this logic, the notion of the political increasingly equates power
with domination, and citizenship with consumerism and passivity. Under
this insufferable climate of manufactured indifference, increased repression,
unabated exploitation, and a war on Iraq that Senator Robert Byrd believes
is rooted in the arrogance of unbridled power, young people have become
the new casualties in an ongoing battle against justice, freedom, social
citizenship, and democracy. As despairing as these conditions appear at
the present moment, they increasingly have become the basis for a surge
of political resistance on the part of many youth, intellectuals, labor
unions, educators, and social movements.11
Educators, young people, parents, religious organizations, community activists,
and other cultural workers 
need
to rethink what it would mean to both interrogate and break away from
the dangerous and destructive ideologies, values, and social relations
of zero tolerance policies as they work in a vast and related number of
powerful institutional spheres to reinforce modes of authoritarian control
and turn a generation of youth into a generation of suspects. This suggests
a struggle both for public space and the conditions for public dialogue
about how to imagine reappropriating a notion of politics that is linked
to the creation of a strong participatory democracy while simultaneously
articulating a new vocabulary, set of theoretical tools, and social possibilities
for re-visioning civic engagement and social transformation. We have entered
a period in which class warfare offers no apologies because it is too
arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance. But the collective need
for justice should never be underestimated even in the darkest of times.
References
American Bar Association. "Report
on Zero tolerance Laws." 28 May 2003 <www.abanet.org/
crimjust/juvius/zerotolreport.html> 29 May 2003.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Society under Siege. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.
Baker, Kevin. "We’re in the Army Now: The G.O.P.’s Plan to Militarize Our Culture." Harper's Magazine 27 October 2003: 38-39.
Barsamian, David. "Interview with Angela Davis." The Progressive 28 February 2001: 35.
Beck, Ulrich. The Reinvention of Politics. Trans. Mark Ritter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.
Beger, Randall. "Expansion of Police Power in Public Schools and the Vanishing Rights of Students." Social Justice 29(1/2) (2002): 119-130.
Carter, Graydon. "The President? Go Figure." Vanity Fair 15 December 2003: 69-70.
Cassidy, Peter. "Last Brick in the Kindergulag." 12 May 2003 <alternet.org/print.hgml?Storyld=13616> 15 October 2003.
Chaddock, Gail R. "Safe Schools at a Price." Christian Science Monitor 24 August 1999: 15.
Chery, Carl. "U.S. Army Targets Back Hip-Hop Fans." The Wire/Daily Hip-Hop News 21 October 2003 <www.sohh.com/article_print.php?content_ID=5162> 22 October 2003.
Childhood Poverty Research Brief 2. "Child Poverty in the States: Levels and Trends from 1979 to 1998." 13 September 2001 <http://www.nccp.org> 27 September 2003.
Child Research Briefs. "Poverty, Welfare, and Children: A Summary of the Data." 10 October 2003 <www.childtrends.org> 12 October 2003.
Clemetson, Lynette. "More Americans in Poverty in 2002 Census Study Says." New York Times 27 September 2003: A1, A10.
Dillon, Sam. "Cameras Watching Students, Especially in Biloxi." The New York Times 24 September 2003: A24.
Denver Rocky Mountain News. [Editorial] "Zero Tolerance is the Policy." 22 June 1999: 38A.
Delgado, Gary. "'Mo' Prisons Equals Mo' Money." Colorlines Winter (1999-2000): 18.
Donziger, Steven. The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996.
Elias, Marilyn. "Disparity in Black and White?" USA Today 11 December 2000: 9D.
Featherstone, Liza. "A Common Enemy: Students Fight Private Prisons." Dissent Fall (2000): 78.
Garland, David. "Men and Jewelry; Prison as Exile: Unifying Laughter and Darkness." The Chronicle of Higher Education 6 July (2001): B4.
Garner, Dwight. "The Season of the Heirheads." The New York Times 16 November 2003: 29.
Gordon, Jane. "In Schools, Bad Behavior Is Shown the Door." The New York Times 16 November 2003: 14CN.
Goodman, Ellen. "'Zero Tolerance' Means Zero Chance for Troubled Kids." Centre Daily Times 4 January 2000: 8.
Herbert, Bob. "Young, Jobless, Hopeless." The New York Times 6 January 2003: A35.
Jackson, Jesse. [An Interview with Jesse Jackson] "First Class Jails, Second-Class Schools." Rethinking Schools Spring (2000): 16.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.
Leland, John. "Once You've Seen Paris, Everything is E=mc2." The New York Times 23 November 2003: 9.
Lewin, Tamar. "Study Finds Racial Bias in Public Schools." The New York Times 11 March 2000: A14.
Lewin, Tamar & Jennifer Medina. "To Cut Failure Rate, Schools Shed Students." The New York Times 31 July 2003: A1.
Lotke, Erik. "The Prison-Industrial Complex." Multinational Monitor 26 November 1996 <http://www.igc.org/ncia/pic.html> 10 September 2002.
Michie, Gregory. "One Strike and You're Out: Does Zero Tolerance Work? Or Does Kicking Kids out of School Just Make Things Worse?" Chicago Reader 29(49) (2000): 24.
Moore, Brian. "Letting Software Make the Call." Chicago Reader 29(49) (2000): 18.
Nieves, Evelyn. "California Proposal Toughens Penalties for Young Criminals." The New York Times 6 March 2000: A1, A15.
Norquist, Grover. Cited in Robert Dreyfuss, "Grover Norquist: 'Field Marshal' of the Bush Plan." The Nation 14 May 2001 <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010514&s=dreyfuss> 15 May 2001.
Patchett, Ann. "The Age of Innocence." The New York Times Sunday Magazine 29 September 2002: 17.
Piana, Libero Della. "Crime and Punishment in Schools: Students of Color are Facing More Suspensions Because of Racially Biased Policies." The San Francisco Chronicle 9 February 2000: A21.
Press, Eyall. "The Color Test." Lingua Franca October (2000): 55.
Riddle, Debbie. Cited by Bill Moyers on NOW, aired on 14 May 2003.
Rimer, Sara and Raymond Bonner. "Whether to Kill those Who Killed as Youths." The New York Times 22 August 2000: Al6.
Street, Paul. "Deep Poverty, Deep Deception: Facts that Matter beneath the Imperial Helicopters." Speech presented at The Illinois Welfare Reform Symposium, 17 June 2003, Chicago, Illinois.
Street, Paul. "Race, Prison, and Poverty: The Race to Incarcerate in the Age of Correctional Keynesianism." Z Magazine. 10 May 2001: 26.
Talbot, Margaret. "The Maximum Security Adolescent." The New York Times Magazine 10 September 2000: 42.
Thernstrom, Abigail. "Schools Are Responsible for the Main Source of Racial Inequality Today." Los Angeles Times 13 November 2003: B17.
Tree, Sanho. "The War at Home." Sojourners Magazine May-June 2003: 1-4.
Vinci, James. "U.S. Prison and Jail Population Increases in 2002." Common Dreams News Center. 27 July 2003 <www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0727-01.htm> 28 July 2003.
Wokusch, Heather. "Leaving Our Children Behind." Common Dreams News Center. 8 July 2002 <www.commondreams.org/views02/0708-08.htm> 9 July 2002.
Zernike, Kate. "Crackdown on Threats in School Fails a Test." The New York Times 17 May 2001: A21.
Zizek, Slavoj. "Today Iraq. Tomorrow....Democracy?"
In These Times 5 May 2003: 28.
1
These figures largely
come from Children’s Defense Fund, The State of Children in America’s
Union: A 2002 Action Guide to Leave No Child Behind. Washington, D.C.:
Children’s Defense Fund Publication, 2002: iv-v, 13.
2
For an insightful commentary
on the media and the racial nature of the war on drugs, see Jimmie L.
Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, The
Anti-cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.
3
These figures are taken
from the following sources: Gary Delgado, "'Mo' Prisons Equals MO'
Money." Colorlines. Winter (1999-2000): 18; Fox Butterfield,
"Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction." The New
York Times 10 August 2000: A10.
4
For some extensive analyses
of the devastating affects the criminal justice system is having on black
males, see Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment
in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; Jerome Miller,
Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice
System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; David Cole, No
Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System.
New York: The New Press, 1999; Marc Mauer & Meda Chesney-Lind, Eds.
Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment.
New York: The New Press, 2002.
5
Even more shameful is
the fact that such discrimination against African Americans is often justified
from the Olympian heights of institutions such as Harvard University by
apologists such as lawyer Randall Kennedy who argue that such laws, criminal
policies, and police practices are necessary to protect "good"
blacks from "bad" blacks who commit crimes. See Randall Kennedy,
Race, Crime, and the Law. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
6
For a moving narrative
of the devastating effects of the juvenile justice system on teens, see
Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile
Court. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
7
These examples are taken
from a report on zero tolerance laws by the American Bar Association.
<www.abanet.org/crimjust/juvius/zerotolreport.html>
29 May 2003.
8
It was reported in the
New York Times that in responding to the spate of recent school
shootings, the FBI has provided educators across the country with a list
of behaviors that could identify "students likely to commit an act
of lethal violence." One such behavior is "resentment over real
or perceived injustices." The reach of domestic militarization becomes
more evident as the F.B.I. not only takes on the role of monitoring potentially
disruptive student behavior, but also to the degree to which teachers
are positioned to become adjuncts of the criminal justice system. The
story and quotes appear in the editorial, "F.B.I. Caution Signs for
Violence in Classroom." The New York Times 7 September 2000:
A18.
9
As has been widely reported,
the prison industry has become big business with many states spending
more on prison construction than on university construction. See, Anthony
Lewis, "Punishing the Country." The New York Times 2
December 1999: A1.
10
For a provocative analysis
of the relationship between what Norman Geras (1998) calls "the contract
of mutual indifference" (30) and neoliberalism's refusal of the social
as a condition for contemporary forms mutual indifference; see Geras,
The Contract of Mutual Indifference. London: Verso Press, 1998.
11
For some recent commentaries
on the new student movement, see Liza Featherstone, "The New Student
Movement," The Nation. 15 May 2000: 11-15; David Samuels,
"Notes from Underground: Among the Radicals of the Pacific Northwest."
Harper's Magazine.
May (2000): 35-47; Katazyna Lyson, Monique Murad & Trevor Stordahl,
"Real Reformers, Real Results."
Mother Jones. October (2000): 20-22. Alexander Cockburn,
Jeffrey St. Clair & Allan Sekula, 5 Days that Shook the World.
London: Verso Press, 2000; Mark Edelman Boren, Student Resistance.
New York: Routledge, 2001; See also, Imre Szeman, "Learning from Seattle."
Special Issue of The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies
24(1-2) January-June (2002).
Author Notes
Henry A. Giroux holds the Waterbury Chair Professorship at Penn State University. His most recent books include: Breaking into the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics, Public Spaces/Private Lives: Democracy beyond 9/11, The Abandoned Generation: Democracy beyond the Culture of Fear, and his forthcoming book co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post Civil Rights Era. His primary research areas are: cultural studies, youth studies, critical pedagogy, popular culture, social theory, and the politics of higher education.
