ABSTRACT
In this interview, Prof. Henry Giroux engages with some of the most challenging issues associated with the neoliberal educational agenda. In the introductory part, he discusses neoliberalism’s different operating registers including the ‘war over ideas’. In particular, he examines how the neoliberal ideology came to dominate some of the commanding institutions of contemporary societies. At the same time, he also discusses the centrality of education under neoliberal modes of governance as well as the role of large-scale assessments and quantitative data in educational research. In the central part of the interview Prof. Giroux examines neoliberalism’s strategy of appropriating ideas and concepts that lie outside its gravitational orbit and its transformative influence on our way of thinking about education and public policy in general. In the closing part of the interview, Prof. Giroux identifies the most pressing negative effects of neoliberalism for democratic societies.
