Henry Giroux Quotes

Getting a lot more Americans interested in politics is not the same as getting a lot more Americans knowledgeable about the workings of democracy or government. It has brought the worldview associated with sports-talk radio to politics; you’ve got a team and you want that team to win, and the other team is always the worst, and the refs are always unfairly treating your side. Heaven forbid you concede that the other team played a better game.

To become informed and hold government accountable, the general public needs to obtain news that is comprehensive yet interesting and understandable, that conveys facts and outcomes, not cosmetic images and airy promises. But that is not what the public demands.

In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.

We need to educate students to be critical agents, to learn how to take risks, engage in thoughtful dialogue, and taking on the crucial issue what it means to be socially responsible.

There is one solution to all of our problems: Teaching our kids clarity of thought and political representation in democracy. That's it.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.

It is an obvious and blatant stupidity beyond my ability to articulate how dumb it is for us not to teach our children how to run the government.

What I hear every day on talk radio is America's lack of education - and I don't mean lack of college degrees. I mean lack of the basic art of democracy, the ability to seek the great truths that can come only by synthesizing the small truths possessed by each of us.

A lot of people in government don't really read books at all.

It's difficult for democracy to function properly under the most favorable circumstances, but it has no chance at all when millions of voters are divorced from objective reality and incapable of understanding what is going on in Washington.

The vitality of democracy depends on popular knowledge of complex questions.

… if we really want American politics to improve, then American voters will have to improve as well, by being more educated about the facts, more critical in our thinking and more demanding of our elected officials.

American democracy depends on the public's ability to remain accurately informed on our state of affairs.

The government should train and direct the people in their acquisition of political knowledge and ability, thereby enabling them to exercise the powers of election, recall, initiative, and referendum.

Self-government can succeed only through an instructed electorate.

I believe that when you provide information to people, they become less fearful and they will engage more in their democracy if they are empowered with information.

I believe in an informed electorate, and we need to teach our children to become informed enough to have opinions on world issues or, at least, to understand what the major issues are and who the players are.

Students need to learn how to unlearn those elements of a market driven society that deform their sense of agency, reducing them to simply consumers or even worse to elements of a disposable population. So we need to understand who controls the means of public education and the larger forms of what Raymond Williams called the cultural apparatuses of permanent education both in terms of the dangers they pose and the possibilities they harbor.

If by 'intellectual' you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts and forming ideas for people in power, and telling people what they should believe...they're really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task it is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population SHOULD be anti-intellectual in that repect.

Without an informed electorate, politicians will continue to use the bottom billion merely for photo opportunities, rather than promoting real transformation.

Unless the schools provide our children with a vision of human possibility that enlightens and empowers them with knowledge and taste, they will simply play their role in someone else's marketing schemes. Unless they understand deeply the sources of our democracy, they will take it for granted and fail to exercise their rights and responsibilities.

This is essential that we have a resurgence in democratic participation. And I don't mean big-D Democrat, I mean small-D democrat. I mean getting involved in your neighborhood, your community. This is no time to say, "I'm not into politics." This is a time to go headlong into the welfare of this nation.

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.