GIROUX, Henry A(rmand) 1943-

PERSONAL:

Born September 18, 1943, in Providence, RI; son of Armand and Alice (Waldron) Giroux; married Jeanne Brady, January 6, 1979; children: Jack, Chris, Brett. Education: University of Maine, B.S., 1977; Appalachian State University, M.A., 1978; Carnegie-Mellon University, D.Arts, 1977.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16804-3000.

CAREER:

High school history teacher in Barrington, RI, 1968-75; Boston University, Boston, MA, professor of education, 1977-83; Miami University, Oxford, OH, 1983-92, began as associate professor, became professor of education and renowned scholar in residence; Pennsylvania State University, Philadelphia, PA, Waterbury chair of secondary education, 1992—, also director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural Studies.

WRITINGS:

Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1981.

(Editor, with Anthony Penna and William Pinar) Curriculum and Instruction: Alternatives in Education, McCutchan (Berkeley, CA), 1981.

Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, Heinemann Educational Books (Exeter, NH), 1983.

(Editor, with David Purpel) The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education: Deception or Discovery?, McCutchan (Berkeley, CA), 1983.

(With Michael Ryan) Education under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Debate over Schooling, Bergin & Garvey (South Hadley, MA), 1985, revised second edition, with Stanley Aronowitz, published as Education Still under Siege, Bergin & Garvey (Westport, CT), 1993.

Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1988.

Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning, Bergin & Garvey (Granby, MA), 1988.

(Editor, with Peter McLaren) Critical Pedagogy, the State, and the Struggle for Culture, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1989.

Schooling for Democracy: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age, Routledge (London, England), 1989.

(Editor, with Roger Simon) Popular Culture, Schooling, and Everyday Life, Bergin & Garvey (South Hadley, MA), 1989.

(Editor) Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics: Redrawing Educational Boundaries, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1991.

(With Stanley Aronowitz) Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1991.

Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education, Routledge (New York, NY), 1992.

Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1993.

Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture, Routledge, 1994.

(With Peter McLaren) Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies, Routledge (New York, NY), 1994.

(With others) Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces, Routledge (New York, NY), 1996.

Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth, Routledge (New York, NY), 1996.

Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today's Youth, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor, with Patrick Shannon) Education and Cultural Studies: Toward a Performative Practice, Routledge (New York, NY), 1997.

Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling: A Critical Reader, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1997.

The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 1999.

Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies, Routledge (New York, NY), 2000.

Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 2000.

Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2001.

Breaking In to the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics, Blackwell (Maiden, MA), 2002.

The Abandoned Generation: Democracy beyond the Culture of Fear, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to education and social theory journals; member of editorial and advisory boards for scholarly journals; editor or coeditor of book series for State University of New York Press and Bergin & Garvey.

SIDELIGHTS:

Education professor Henry A. Giroux has been a strong critic of the influence of corporations and the media on American youth and the education system. In his writings, he strives to dispel misconceptions about teenagers that have been promoted by simplistic messages broadcast by the media and adults' fears of the younger generation. Some of his books, such as 1994's Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture, are essay collections that cover a wide variety of topics, while others, such as 1999's The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, focus on one main theme: in this case, the dangers of a large corporation's powerful cultural influence.

Throughout much of his published work Giroux emphasizes recurrent points: that many of adults' fears about teens are based on inaccurate cultural messages, that the media oversimplify social problems, and that the predatory marketing practices of corporations are having adverse effects on young people's education. He also maintains that teachers and other adults must learn to teach children and youth both within the constraints of today's students' cultural knowledge and outside the boundaries of white America's viewpoints.

Giroux often uses popular films to illustrate his points. In Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth, for example, he "questions the imagery that adults fabricate about youth," according to Nation contributor Nick Charles, while discussing such films as River's Edge and My Own Private Idaho. Such movies not only present a standard for teens to emulate but also create oversimplified caricatures that adults come to believe in. "At times Giroux's dense prose is difficult to weave through," commented Charles, "but at its most accessible the book shows how adults shed responsibility, assume a stance of righteous indignation and point fingers at a group busy trying to figure out who they are and where they fit in."

Breaking In to the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics similarly discusses the movie industry's influence on American culture, and here Giroux further comments that films can be used as tools for discussion between teachers and students. "Giroux insists that teachers need to understand and appreciate what kids know and not simply lament what they don't know and don't seem to care about," wrote Jon Lewis in an Afterimage review. And one of the things that students know well these days is movies. Even though Hollywood films repeatedly offer pat solutions, stereotypical characters, crude scenes of sex and violence, and simplistic liberal messages, they can still be used by teachers to discuss just these issues by putting them in context and discussing exactly how Hollywood got them wrong. Lewis cited Giroux's discussion of the movie Dangerous Minds, in which a white female teacher gains the respect of her inner city, poor, minority students by being tough and kicking butt (she knows karate). Giroux, Lewis explained, reveals how the ludicrous premise exposes the "white colonialism (masked here as white liberal civic-mindedness)" of the filmmakers. Breaking In to the Movies and other books such as Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today's Youth, which focuses on television viewing, argue that educators need to recognize how the media have become tools for passively teaching our youth and that they need to become more active participants in discussing with students the programs and films they are viewing.

Another influence on youth that Giroux finds increasingly disturbing is the corporate intrusion into young people's lives. In 2000's Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture he contends, according to Booklist critic Julia Glynn, that corporations are pressuring "young people to face adulthood too early" through devices ranging from jean commercials to logo placement to beauty pageants. He continues this argument in Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism in which, as Jack Forman put it in a Library Journal review, he asserts that "the forces of capitalism have foisted an individualistic ethic on our society at the expense of the common good." He takes particular aim, however, at the Disney corporation in his 1999 book, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. Here, Giroux attacks Disney on several counts, including its portrayal of a sanitized American history (as particularly portrayed in its theme park Main Streets), cultural homogenization (employees are required to look a certain way; the town of Celebration, which is run by Disney, also requires homes to conform to a standard), and movies that define women in terms of their codependent relationships with men. Since all of this is, in the end, designed to increase Disney's profits, the cultural influence becomes all the more dangerous to the children influenced by it. Attacks on the Disney culture are not unique, however, and a Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that Carl Hiassen's Team Rodent does a better job without the "dense, academic prose" that Giroux employs.

In 2003, Giroux completed The Abandoned Generation: Democracy beyond the Culture of Fear in which he attacks the Bush administration for cutting back education funding while simultaneously making educators more accountable for achieving academic standards. He also continues his criticisms of the media and corporations' negative impact on the education system. The book, according to Forman in another Library Journal review, "mixes reasoned analysis with simplistic polemics." Although controversial, Giroux has become a respected and influential social critic, who, as Lewis put it, in the end "doesn't care if he's right, so long as he's got you thinking."

Giroux once told CA: "My work has always been informed by the notion that it is imperative to make hope practical and despair unconvincing. My focus is primarily on schools and the roles they play in promoting both success and failure among different classes and groups of students. I am particularly interested in the way in which schools mediate—through both the overt and hidden curricula—those messages and values that serve to privilege some groups at the expense of others. By viewing schools as political and cultural sites as well as instructional institutions, I have tried in my writings to provide educators with the categories and forms of analyses that will help them to become more critical in their pedagogies and more visionary in their purposes. Schools are immensely important sites for constituting subjectivities, and I have and will continue to argue that we need to make them into models of critical learning, civic courage, and active citizenship."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Afterimage, winter, 2002, Jon Lewis, "Public Pedagogy," p. 17.

American Studies International, February, 1998, Kate Kruckemeyer, review of Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth, p. 100.

Booklist, March 15, 2000, Julia Glynn, review of Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture, p. 298.

Comparative Education Review, August, 1998, Candace Kay, review of Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today's Youth, p. 370.

Contemporary Sociology, November, 1994, review of Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education, p. 909.

Criticism, spring, 1997, Jerry Herron, review of Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture, p. 281.

Education Digest, February, 1986, review of Education under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Debate over Schooling, p. 68; October, 1991, review of Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics: Redrawing Educational Boundaries, p. 77.

Harvard Educational Review, November, 1991, review of Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics, p. 494; summer, 1994, review of Disturbing Pleasures and Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference, p. 222; spring, 1996, review of Fugitive Cultures, p. 156; spring, 1998, review of Channel Surfing, p. 106.

Library Journal, May 15, 1996, Kent Worcester, review of Fugitive Cultures, p. 76; December, 2001, Jack Forman, review of Public Spaces,Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism, p. 149; April 15, 2003, Jack Forman, review of The Abandoned Generation: Democracy beyond the Culture of Fear, p. 107.

Library Quarterly, January, 1992, Michael F. Winter, review of Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism, p. 100.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 10, 1997, review of Channel Surfing, p. 10.

Nation, September 21, 1992, review of Border Crossings, p. 295; October 21, 1996, Nick Charles, review of Fugitive Cultures, p. 27.

Publishers Weekly, October 7, 1988, Penny Kaganoff, review of Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age, p. 112; May 31, 1999, review of The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, p. 76.

Times Educational Supplement, June 5, 1992, review of Border Crossings, p. 34; July 20, 2001, review of Stealing Innocence, p. 31.

Village Voice Literary Supplement, April, 1992, review of Border Crossings, p. 19.*