Discourses of opposition and resistance in education: Alternative spaces for a militant pedagogy

This chapter reviews the educational literature on student resistance and attempts to recast it in the context of authoritarian capitalism. It proposes a pedagogy of resistance and disobedience with specific goals and political content. Resistance must be distinguished from rebelliousness as reaction without clear political meaning. Student resistance in inner city schools has been one of the largest sustained guerilla warfare campaigns since the advent of mass literacy. Henry Giroux's analysis proposes to reframe school failure and oppositional behavior away from functionalism and mainstream educational psychology to political analysis. Authoritarianism and commodification seem to be among the leading ideologies shaping education, particularly the educational vision of the Trump administration with the appointment of Betsy DeVos, a multi-millionaire, second-generation, religious right funder, as Secretary of Education. Such educational process of estrangement functions to alienate students from the world around them, from themselves, and from each other.