The Claims Put Forth By Henry Giroux - 1603 Words

In this paper I will take the claims put forth by Henry Giroux in his recent interview regarding the increasingly negative effects of neoliberalism, and as he calls it casino capitalism, across the world, particularly in the realm of education, and juxtapose them with various Marxist theories, displaying how the latter can be accurately applied in a thorough analysis of the former. More specifically, I will demonstrate how Marx’s theories dealing with Domination, Alienation, and Historical Materialism aptly tie to Giroux’s assertions. Giroux claims that the contemporary education system discourages the notion of true learning and critical thinking, and is instead a mere avenue that trains one for the inevitable workplace. I believe that†¦show more content†¦Capitalists realize the threat critical thinkers pose to their position, while at the same time recognize the ability of job-training based people to fuel their notion of an ideal society, and to ensure continued power, they use their vast control over educational institutions and the market to create conditions where job-training based education is favored over critical thinking enhancing education. The creation of such conditions has led to the emergence of dissimulation and a false consciousness , where people are deceived into taking as natural something that has in fact merely been created by other people: they truly believe they know what is best for them but this belief arises from an incomplete knowledge of the conditions shaping the world tha t surrounds them. I feel that it is this very illusory nature of capitalism that ensures its survival. Capitalism requires that a majority of the people will fail per se, so that there can be any success at all: a very real consequence from which the educational system fails to escape. A valid refutation of this argument can be that, although the logic of it is sound, it is still fundamentally based upon the assumption that people inclined towards the social sciences are inherently more inclined to pose a threat to the capitalist society. One may argue that anyone, regardless of their skill set, may or may not pose a disruption in