Image by Allison Acosta via teachingforchange via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
Originally on RT America on Sep 9, 2021
The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel on Jul 5, 2022
On the show Chris Hedges discusses the age of manufactured ignorance with the scholar Professor Henry A. Giroux.
“Education,” the scholar Henry Giroux writes, “has increasingly become a tool of domination as right-wing pedagogical apparatuses controlled by the entrepreneurs of hate, attack workers, the poor, people of color, refugees, immigrants from the south and others considered disposable. A Republican Party dominated by the far right believes education should function as a tool of propaganda and pedagogy of oppression, rightly named “patriotic education.” Dissent is defiled as corrupting American values and any classroom that addresses racial injustice is viewed as antithetical to “a Christian and white supremacist world where Black people ‘know their place’.” Banning instruction on “critical race theory” has become the new McCarthyism. Noam Chomsky argues that any reference to the history of slavery, systemic racism or racial injustice now replaces “Communism and Islamic terror as the plague of the modern age.” Chomsky,” Giroux argues, “may not have gone far enough, since GOP extremists argue that the threat of communism has simply been expanded to include Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Movement and other emerging protest groups, all connected and viewed as updated forms of Marxism and part of an international communist-global conspiracy. The Red Scare,” Giroux warns, “is alive and well in America.”
From the archives:
Geo Maher: A World Without Police + Nonviolence and Restorative Justice
The War on Wokeness, by Kenn Orphan
From Iowa Nice to Iowa Nazi: A Report from the Friendly Fascist Heartland, by Paul Street
Chris Hedges: Those Statues Are Statements Of White Supremacy, Part II
Chris Hedges: How Teaching History Is Too Often A Form Of Social Control, Part I
Dandelion Salad 
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Oh my Lord, Henry, your image is so low resolution, broken up, and blurry that I feel like I am doing some very bad acid watching your face melt and reform. It is not hard or expensive to fix the problem. You need first to get a higher resolution webcam, and if that doesn’t work by itself, you will need to figure out where in the slowing down of the signal is happening. If you have a high transmission speed connection, like the 1,000 Mbits/sec that Verizon offers. The problem could also be in the transition of the signal to and from your computer to the modem [I still have that maddening problem with my computer here] or the computer itself might not have a CPU that is fast enough to do fast graphic processing. In the latter case, you might need to upgrade the computer itself, but that is actually unlikely to be where the main problem lies. Anyway, I really do think that this is not a trivial matter. It is important for viewers to see you as you actually look if they are going to feel comfortable with you so that they view you as a trustworthy source. Since Chris’s video streams are already much higher in resolution you might just ask him what kind of hardware he is using to get such a bright and color-true high-res image. OK, `nuff said about that.
The interview itself, btw, is very strong and interesting even if a bit elementary for someone like me who deals with all of these issues every day and has already learned most of these theoretical and practical lessons one way or another through my 26 years of being a professor at the U.of Pittsburgh teaching Propaganda Theories and Rhetorical Analysis to enthusiastic undergrads, including during the 9-11 attacks and the wind-up to the nonsensical, yet thoroughly horrific, War in Iraq.
Henry’s analysis of the implosion and hyper-reification of academe is also right on the money. Funny to say, but in my department, the defenders of the traditional liberal arts education were hardly, aside from myself, those who were farthest to the left, not that that variable isn’t highly subjective. In fact I often found myself much closer to the few in the department who were well versed in traditional, and even classical, rhetorical and pedagogical theories and who saw the early grounding of education in a student’s mastering the three branches of the Trivium as being as important today as it was 2500 years ago. Although we agreed upon many political issues of the day, I felt much less connection to the avowedly postmodernist and poststructuralist colleagues who had come up through programs that have largely abandoned the rhetorical foundations of all liberal education and teach instead, just as Henry suggests here and in his many books, a kind of schizoid juxtaposition of courses, each of which has been commodified and reified, and that usually despite the intention of the teacher. One can, of course, learn many things through such a rather continually self-sabotaging manner, but to my mind it makes far more sense to make sure that all students, at both the undergraduate level, first have some good comprehension of the HISTORICAL and theoretical development of the exceptionally well-developed Western rhetorical tradition in the context of ongoing process of social development/regression in order for the connections and syntheses of what they are learning to become richer and more deeply operative than they can become without such an understanding.
But `nuff said here too. The main point is that I agree nearly completely with the counter-hegemonic pedagogical models you are developing and believe you are doing a great service to the good cause of transforming education in North America, at all levels, in a manner that allows for a much freer exploration and practice of mercilessly sub-alternated attempts to educate students as human beings seeking to know, rather than as semi- automatons who need only to be “trained” to do acceptable service in their soon to come, — if they are lucky! — years of vocational stultification under the mind-numbing aegis of the contemporary high finance ruled, deindustrialized, oligarchic, kleptocratic, monopolized, politically duopolized, rabidly imperialist and mass murderous, neoliberal capitalist status quo!
Thanks for your comment, drwmrhetor, however, Henry is not likely to see it here.
‘Manufactured ignorance’ began with religions.
People feared what they couldn’t understand or explain, so they simply deferred to the priests and scholars.
The ruling class have always despised equality in education because it undermines their authority.
Progress?
Where did that go?
Amnesia of our past has been a thing for over a century, ever being upgraded and that is what we’re seeing today — the latest version of amnesia. The creation of amnesia of their past was first directed at the early unions since Haymarket. It’s now generalized to slavery etc. This upgrade has also been used to upgrade the attack on academics and university professors that has its own history. I hope this history of forced amnesia isn’t itself becoming forgotten.
Yes. Thanks for commenting, David.