In Henry's lecture, I could witness two key concepts; corporate pedagogy and critical pedagogy.
Corporate pedagogy immobilizes the mind and the soul, emphasizing repressive modes of learning that promote winning at all costs, learning how not to question authority. As learning is privatized, depoliticized, and focused on teaching students how to be good consumers, any notions of the social, moral, and democratic dies.
Critical pedagogy is dangerous to larger corporate and political forces because it provides the intellectual capacities and ethical norms for students to hold power accountable, fight against poverty, ecological destruction, and the dismantling of the state, also because it contains the potential for inculcating in students a desire for learning about modes of knowledge and a real democracy based on equality and freedom.
The teachers' role as public intellectuals is essential to fight against the political forces, they can raise their collective voices against the influence of corporations that are flooding societies with a culture of war, consumerism, commercialism, and privatization. I consider this is cooperative labor; students and teachers play crucial roles. For instance, teachers can mobilize young people to defend education as a public good by advocating for policies that invest in schools rather than in militarism.
As Dr. Giroux claims in the lecture, within the neoliberalism, teaching and learning are removed from the discourse of democracy and civic culture, defined as a purely private right rather than a public good. Universities are under enormous assault, but we as citizens need to fight against it and defend what we do; being resistant and applying the critical pedagogy.
