Summary

• Objects (0 modified, 0 added, 1 removed)
  • Caselist.CitesClass[19]

Details

Caselist.CitesClass[19]

Cites

...	...	@@ -1,37 +1,0 @@
1		-Case
2		-Part 1 is the Advocacy
3		-Plan text: Public colleges and universities ought not any restrict constitutionally protected speech. I reserve to right to clarify. Neg should check T and theory interps about the plan texts in CX. I will adopt plan texts so long as it’s reasonable to prevent the proliferation of frivolous theory.
4		-
5		-Educational spaces have been coopted by a neoliberal mindset and controlling the younger generation into a mindset of capitalism. The aff’s epistemology endorses a method of pursuing truth through critical pedagogy and creating new language. Giroux 15
6		-What happens to the memory of history when it ceases to be testimony?" - James Young (1) At a time when both political parties, anti-public intellectual pundits and mainstream news sources view the purpose of higher education almost exclusively as a workstation for training a global workforce, generating capital for the financial elite, and as a significant threat to the power of the military, corporate and ultra-rich, it becomes more difficult to reclaim a history in which the culture of business is not the culture of higher education. This is certainly not meant to suggest that higher education once existed in an ideal past in which it only functioned as a public good and provided a public service in the interest of developing a democratic polity. Higher education has always been fraught with notable inequities and anti-democratic tendencies, but it also once functioned as a crucial reminder of both its own limitations and the potential role it might play in attacking social problems and deepening the promise of a democracy to come. As difficult as it may seem to believe, John Dewey's insistence that "democracy needs to be reborn in each generation, and education is its midwife" was once taken seriously by many academic leaders. (2) Today, it is fair to see that Dewey's once vaunted claim has been willfully ignored, forgotten or made an object of scorn. (3) Throughout the 20th century, there have been flashpoints in which the struggle to shape the university in the interest of a more substantive democracy was highly visible. Those of us who lived through the 1960s remember a different image of the university. Rather than attempt to trained MBAs, define education through the lens of mathematical utility, indoctrinate young people into the culture of capitalism, decimate the power of faculty and turn students into mindless consumers, the university presented itself as a site of struggle. That is, it served, in part, as a crucial public sphere that held power accountable, produced a vast array of critical intellectuals, joined hands with the antiwar and civil rights movements and robustly challenged what Mario Savio once called "the machine" - an operating structure infused by the rising strength of the financial elite that posed a threat to the principles of critique, dissent, critical exchange and a never-ending struggle for inclusivity. The once vibrant spirit of resistance that refused to turn the university over to corporate and military interests is captured in Savio's moving and impassioned speech on December 2, 1964, on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley: There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears, upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all. (4) The 1960s may have been the high point of that period in US education in which the merging of politics, justice, civil rights and the search for truth made clear what it meant to consider higher education as a democratic public sphere. Not everyone was pleased or supported this explosion of dissent, resistance to the Vietnam War and struggle to make campuses across the United States more inclusive and emancipatory. Conservatives were deeply disturbed by the campus revolts and viewed them as a threat to their dream worlds of privatization, deregulation, militarization, capital accumulation and commodification. What soon emerged was an intense struggle for the soul of higher education. For instance, the Powell Memo was released on August 23, 1971, and authored for the Chamber of Commerce by Lewis F. Powell Jr., who would later be appointed as a member of the US Supreme Court. (5) Powell identified the US college campus "as the single most dynamic source" for producing and housing intellectuals "who are unsympathetic to the free enterprise system." (6) He recognized that one crucial strategy in changing the political composition of higher education was to convince university administrators and boards of trustees that the most fundamental problem facing universities was the lack of conservative educators, or what he labeled the "imbalance of many faculties." (7) Conservatives have a long history of viewing higher education as a cradle of left-wing thought and radicalism. The Powell Memo was designed to develop a broad-based strategy, not only to counter dissent but also to develop a material and ideological infrastructure with the capability to transform the US public consciousness through a conservative pedagogical commitment to reproduce the knowledge, values, ideology and social relations of the corporate state. Not only did the Powell Memo understand and take seriously the educative nature of politics, it also realized that if a crisis of economics was not matched by a crisis of ideas, it was easier to reproduce a society in which conformity could be bought off through the swindle of a neoliberal mantra that used the discourse of freedom, individuality, mobility and security to serve the interests of the rich and powerful. The Powell Memo was the most influential of one of a number of ideological interventions in the 1970s that developed political roadmaps to crush dissent, eliminate tenure and transform the university into an adjunct of free-market fundamentalism. But it certainly was not the first shot fired as part of a larger conservative struggle to shape US higher education. (8) Conservatives have a long history of viewing higher education as a cradle of left-wing thought and radicalism. As early as the 1920s, conservatives were waging an ideological war against liberal education and the intellectuals who viewed higher education as a site of critical dialogue and a public sphere engaged in both the pursuit of truth and in developing a space where students learned to read both the word and world critically. Conservatives were horrified by the growing popularity of critical views of education and modes of pedagogy that connected what students were taught to both their own development as critical agents and to the need to address important social problems. During the McCarthy era, criticism of the university and its dissenting intellectuals cast a dark cloud over the
7		-
8		-Students are opposing modern politics and endorsing socialism. They voice their opinions through activism and try to solve multiple existing forms oppression. SA 16
9		-Last school year, student members of Socialist Alternative initiated and led the organizing of the two massive #MillionStudentMarch national days of action against student debt and racism. We demanded tuition-free public college, cancellation of all student debt, a $15 minimum wage for all campus workers, and the divestment from private prisons by all colleges and universities. Last November, we had over 15,000 students in the streets at 110 college campuses across the country. It is time for all students and young people who want to fight for serious reforms – yet see who economic and social justice cannot be achieved without fundamental system change , and that the connection all forms of oppression have to each other is capitalism – to come together. Therefore, student members of Socialist Alternative are officially launching Socialist Students, a nationwide initiative to help build the socialist movement in schools and on campuses across the country. What Will Socialist Students Do? Socialist Students will hold regular meetings on campuses across the country (SocialistStudents.net to find the group nearest you). We will have political discussions on all sorts of topics ranging from current events, to socialist history and theory, to Black and LGBTQ liberation, the limits of reform under capitalism, and most importantly how to put these into practice building the socialist movement on our campuses. We intend to hold debates on campuses across the country with chapters of College Democrats and College Republicans as well as Libertarians on who to support this Presidential election. Socialist Students will argue the case for students and progressives to support Jill Stein in order to continue the political revolution against the billionaire class that Bernie Sanders started. We want to explain to our fellow students why we do not see the corporate-controlled Democratic Party as a vehicle for left-wing change, and why we think that continuing to support the “lesser evil” year after year is a dead end. We will also help organize anti-Trump protests and demonstrations but put forward to our fellow students that, despite what the corporate media may tell us, supporting Hillary Clinton and the Democrats is not the way to stop the right populist threat!
10		-
11		-Colleges are doing their best to restrict protests. Kaminer 13
12		-A draft from June declared free speech and assembly to be subject to the needs for public order. It would restrict gatherings and the distribution of leaflets to approved areas and times and would forbid faculty members from taking part in protests during working hours. Sponsors of planned protests with as few as 25 students would have to give at least 24 hours’ notice of location, date, time and expected turnout, subject to the college’s approval or alteration. In the case of protests that pose “an immediate threat to persons or property,” officials “may seek the immediate intervention of public safety officers or external law enforcement,” the draft states. The change in policy could have a significant effect, both at City College, where student resentment about the community center has repeatedly boiled over, and across the entire university system, where faculty resistance to Pathways, a contested academic initiative, is at a high simmer. In addition to their anger over the proscribed action at Cooper Union, student leaders also took offense at being given a reduced role in the disciplinary process and in the drafting of the document itself. “The whole community at Cooper got really riled up,” said Hadar Cohen, a member of the engineering school’s student council. Along with faculty members, they objected vehemently at a meeting in the university’s Great Hall last week.
13		-
14		-Student protests oppose neoliberalism in higher education, translating theory into praxis. Delgado and Ross 16
15		-As students’ collective actions keep gaining more political relevance, student and university movements also establish themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues, movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert educational reforms, but in addition, they have become “strategic nodes” for and the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education, and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of “new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony” (p. 1). The strategic importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their role in “the development of new technologies, new forms of production and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel.” (p.8) Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in “the development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices” (p.8) The main objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and frames in today’s corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students’ repertoires or tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. An Overview of Student Movements Generally speaking, students are well positioned as political actors. They have been actively involved in the politics of education since the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of the political left (e.g. students’ role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7 in Cuba during the 50’s and in the formation of The New Left in the United States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier student’s involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). Students are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values, interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zielińska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society (Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common function, role in society or social objective, which is “to study” something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social movement (LuesherMamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims, organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention, 3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas.
16		-
17		-Colleges and universities are restricting articles that radically oppose the current neoliberal university and use their power to maintain their stronghold. Kaplan 11
18		-DISCONTENT ON CAMPUS One of the most revealing examples of students' discontent with the confines of academia was reflected through college administrators' restriction of student collegiate newspaper editors. Administrators often intimidated students to not produce articles that challenged the college. While restlessness regarding the financial crisis was evident across the country, the feeling manifested at schools in New York City, which was the first site of students' meaningful dissatisfaction with the current intellectual scene. 25 Throughout the 1920s, administrators feared any poor representation of their college, and thus controlled collegiate paper columnists and editors regarding articles they were permitted to circulate. In 1926, Felix S. Cohen, later to write for the Revolt, was forbidden to write anything on the subject of the R.O.T.C.26 The censorship was a direct result of the administration's fear of radical thought, and they were quick to discourage any writing that threatened their power. On the subject in a later Revolt article, Meyer Liben wrote, "People in authority" were "finicky and fearful of having their dignity ruffled."27 In 1931, the editor of The Campus, the City College of New York (CCNY) paper, was suspended for essentially criticizing the Dean of the Business School. The same year, the Administration not only pulled final funding for the paper, but started their own paper, The Faculty Bulletin, which was to be distributed without cost to rival the student paper. President Robinson deemed the paper the only official source of College news and condemned student papers since he claimed they were not widely circulated. The Alumni Association promised that they would reinstate financial support for The Campus if the editorials were "softened," since the Association even admitted that they wanted the student paper to "play ball" with the Administration. 28 To fill the position of the Acting Editor-in-Chief, the Association chose a student who had served on the business board of the staff for seven weeks and was noticeably under qualified. He admitted he was a novice regarding editorial work and in fact said he did not want the position. For the new Editor to be inducted, they needed approval from the staff. When the staff crushingly rejected the nomination, the Board of Directors repealed the right for staff members to be able to appoint any member of the paper. In tum, 24, later to become 32, staff members resigned. Students felt "that no paper at all was preferable to one which tempered its editorial policy to suit financial exigencies and over which they had not the final control."29
19		-
20		-
21		-Part 2 is the Role of the Ballot
22		-The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who better rejects neoliberalism and reclaims higher education.
23		-The judge is in a position to be an inclusive educator, and has an obligation to open up the space for multiple pedagogies, or polyvocal debate. Koh and Niemi
24		-For as long as there has been debate, there has been the debate about what debate is. We are not against a discussion of what constitutes debate. In fact we are absolutely for it. We argue that this is a crucial debate within debates. The question should not be “what is debate?” The proper question is “what can debate do?” The constitutive feature of debate that we are most abstractly interested in is the precise one that is so often banished by debate pundits – the possibilities of what it can do. We do not yet know what debate can do. All are welcome to accept the challenge of forcing debate into a linear and instrumental framework, but be warned it will certainly fail. Debate is a process and a field, not a mechanism. This is the case for polyvocal debate. Our current definition (which is open to redefinition) is that debate should be thought of as a complex assemblage of voices (the debaters, the judge, audiences, coaches, the authors quoted, and so on), and that it is wrong to limit the possible voices or the possible enunciations of those voices. Debate is always about multiple voices – multiple ways of sensing/expressing. Even non-sense and non-expression have their own voices. This is not a paradigm. It is a hypothesis about the system of relations that co-creates debate. The power and potential of polyvocal debate is not located in some far-off future. It is right here right now, and it is also capable of contact with the outsides of one perspective on time and space. To paraphrase June Tyson – Don’t you know? It’s after the end of the world. Within the system of relations composed by polyvocal debate, we always have the ability to ask “should we believe in something in the first place?” as well as “if we believe it, what are its normative implications?” These questions, in whatever form they take, are some of the most primal elements of debate. Restricting the scope of debate to only some of these questions is a serious loss. More absurd is the justification for restriction based on the value of being able to ask and engage with these questions in the first place. It is wrong to assume that chaos and doubt are bad. It is even worse to argue for a progressive fallacy that chaos and doubt can be removed from debate without debate ceasing to be debate at all. Debate is not soccer, or chess, or playing the trumpet. Perhaps it can do similar things to those activities, but if so it is because it does not feature the limits that define soccer or chess or playing the trumpet. It is apparently very easy to make assumptions about what education is. Most often this is accomplished without citing a single theorist on the subject of education OR a robust understanding of what education could be outside of “commonsensical” assumptions (which are less common and relatable that they initially seem). As we often like to tell our students – read the literature. We call the kind of education that is often assumed “banking-style education” after Paulo Friere. This is the notion that education is about accumulating knowledge. 100 facts are better than 99 facts. People devalue education because they think of it only in these calculated terms. To the banking conception, the end game of education would not be an increase in self-respect, a commitment to social justice, or a development of communication and empathetic powers. It would be the resume statement of “things I’ve learned.” We must not buy into this conception of education. In debate, the collaborative way voices intertwine builds a world of speech and frames it. No debate performance can be perfectly reproduced. The judge’s interpretation and voice are then added. The desire for absolutely objective or procedurally exact judging is a desire for an impossibility. We should not be afraid of the judge’s voice. We recognize it as one among many. Some judges speak loudly and have particular desires. We do not begrudge them this. What is important is that they acknowledge that theirs is only one voice among the many and one way of sensing among all sense and nonsense. It is not a question of excluding the chaos or controlling it, but understanding the value in hearing the clash of multiple voices. For nowhere else in school are we given the vibrant opportunity to be as real in the academic space as is in debate; where we are able to read multiple arguments from multiple views from multiple bases. We must encourage debate to be an outlet for the chaotic and doubtful elements of our beliefs for it’s an opportunity to bridge debate’s separation from the real world into our own world. Our lives aren’t always smooth unwavering stories. They are often a chaos that is hard to grasp outside the lens of community. Polyvocal debate is inclusive and encouraging of this chaos, of the hard questions and life changing moments of realization. A form of debate that acts as if it can omit doubt is not a true form of debate at all. This isn’t just an argument for “unique educational value” in the banking-sense. Debate should not be thought of as an esoteric extracurricular designed to spice up the resume. Paradigms of debate that stop at the moment of rational justification treat the issue of what world we create for ourselves as an unnecessary step, but this conversation is what must happen in our lives and further what must happen in debate. Polyvocal debate allows for this discussion. We should not just ask “is deontology true” but further “is it good for me to believe in deontology” or util or contractarianism, etc. Rationality cannot be trusted to judge itself, but abandoning logic altogether isn’t necessary just yet. It is too easy to take up one side or the other (only truth matters or only the good matters). Debate is harder. The tenets of logic and justification can create questionable conclusions, and a truly valuable form of debate must allow us to criticize and reevaluate these conclusions to live our lives to the fullest. We must be able to ask if beliefs empower or disempower our lives. We always have the power to ask should we believe it or is it correct, and exercising this capacity is the practice of debate. There are two ways in which we can understand and consider what we ought to believe – what is rationally justifiable, and what is good for us to believe for ourselves. In our lives we cannot just ask “what do I think is true.” We must always end up asking “is it good for me to believe in what I believe?” This is how we must act in our own lives outside of just the debate space. When we are faced with a difficult situation be it in our personal lives, work, etc., we are inevitably going to be confronted with moments of seemingly undeniable hopelessness; where despite our best efforts and our thinking, we cannot justify or rationally see a way to be happy or push ourselves through to the other side. Is it good for me to believe that no matter what I will do, that I will get a bad grade in this class? Is it good for me to believe that I will fail in my work? Is it good for me to believe in hopelessness? Our answer is no. Our answer is that debate helps you learn new questions as well as new answers. Again and again we’ve heard the articles and arguments that collapse everything to the old questions: education versus fairness, the rules versus innovation and expansion, correct ways of being versus incorrect ones. Bizarrely there are some who like to play with the same questions forever, perpetually flipping bits between one and zero, never writing new code. We are tired of these questions. Perhaps they would be enlivened by new voices. Polyvocality is the necessary and explosive generation of new questions. The practice of debate is an educational activity because it is generative and interrogative of voices. Use it for what it’s used for. Education can be praxis – where the abstraction of theory becomes lived abstractness inside the fabric of everyday experience. Where a radical new way of thinking-feeling the world becomes possible. Where you don’t just learn about quantum physics, but cry at how beautiful the expression of quantum interactions can be and feel blessed to be a part of them, and then teach them to your friends and family. But this is only part of what education is. Education is a becoming that is necessarily political. Often times it is anti-reactionary or anti-conservative, not because it includes some biased political position, but because it is impossible to actually experience learning without it changing you – what you think is right and wrong, what you want to do, and who you think of yourself as. On our view, this makes education necessarily anti-fascist (where fascism is defined as the tendency to over-represent and prefer certain ways of being to others based on normative, intuitive, or ontological claims). No matter your petty political affiliations, too many people in our world must attempt escape everyday, live as targets, suffer, and experience domination. If education is not a force to help us address this, it is not a properly empathetic education. Even if the educational space of debate allows for slightly more opportunities to escape the everyday and find new connections and places to dwell, this is a greater benefit to everyone than any obedience to respectability politics, norms of conduct, or “correct ways of being” could ever achieve. This is how the world works. We should not abandon the cause of empathy just because we can have that elsewhere. It’s not as if we should not care about others at certain times because we do so in others. Debate is foundationally about empathy. Arguments are only persuasive in the ability for their to be foster a shared experience of understanding. Judges vote for arguments that have a particular effect on them – the effect of “being convincing.” Arguments that win send the judge on a path of becoming-convinced. In order for this to happen, the debater must actually get through to the judge on some level, whether intuitively, emotively, via rhetoric, the flow, or explanation. The best debating promotes empathy. Not empathy defined by biased terms – empathy defined by actual contact with actual others, perspectives, and ways of expressing oneself. It is not that young people are in need of moral training or must be told what is right and wrong or that debate should erase and conquer disagreement. Rather, it is that we should strive to learn to live with disagreement. For it is too simple and brute to believe in a monovocal system of thought – that your language is the only Rosetta Stone to translate the world through. Debate must be a place to see how to live with ourselves and live among others. If being the better debater means being the worse person, we should NOT endorse this conception of better debating.
25		-The judge has an obligation to reject neolib as an educator. Neoliberalism ideology forces pedagogies of maintaining the capitalist state among students. The K comes prior to any epistemic knowledge since capitalism asserts control over our systems of thought. Mclaren 1
26		-The epistemological presuppositions that undergird neoliberal capitalism can be unraveled like an unspooled film; each application of neoliberal prescriptions to knowledge formation can be scrutinized in the context of the larger mise-en-scène. Cultural theorists have done an excellent job of understanding the impact of neoliberal ideology on the production of space, place, scale, historical time, and race, gender and class identity and human agency. I agree that this is important work and we need to look at such production in relation to the commodification of everyday life. Among other things, neoliberal logic is a logic of the lowest common denominator, a technocratic rationality in which value is accorded to how much surplus value can be extracted and accumulated..¶ While well-meaning progressive educators might be willing to criticize the manner in which humans are turned into dead objects that Marxists refer to as fetishized commodities, they are often loathe to consider the fact that within capitalist society, all value originates in the sphere of production and that one of the primary roles of schools is to serve as agents or functionaries of capital. Furthermore, they fail to understand that education is more reproductive of an exploitative social order than a constitutive challenge to it precisely because it rests on the foundations of capitalist exchange value. Reading Marx and Freire may not alchemize us into revolutionaries capable of transcending capitalism but ignoring what they had to say about transforming education in the context of class struggle would be a huge loss to our
27		-
28		-exercise of academic freedom, and many academics were either fired or harassed out of their jobs because of their political activities outside the classroom or their alleged communist fervor or left-wing affiliations.
29		-
30		-Higher education is key to maintaining critical pedagogy and challenging neoliberal societies. Proper pedagogy allows students to become agents capable of challenging power structures. Educators must concern themselves with students. Giroux 13
31		-Increasingly, as universities are shaped by an audit culture, the call to be objective and impartial, whatever one's intentions, can easily echo what George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers are often reduced, or reduce themselves, to the role of a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one's pedagogical practices and research undertakings. Hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity, too many scholars refuse to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. Teaching needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues. In opposition to the instrumental model of teaching, with its conceit of political neutrality and its fetishization of measurement, I argue that academics should combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems and the operation of power in the larger society while providing the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. Higher education cannot be decoupled from what Jacques Derrida calls a democracy to come, that is, a democracy that must always "be open to the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself."33 Within this project of possibility and impossibility, critical pedagogy must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should also gain part of its momentum in higher education among students who will go back to the schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces to produce new ideas, concepts and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people and adults live. This is a notion of intellectual practice and responsibility that refuses the professional neutrality and privileged isolation of the academy. It also affirms a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education, politics, and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself. In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue and thought to have real effects, they must advocate that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live. This is a commitment we heard articulated by the brave students who fought tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties and social provisions in Quebec and to a lesser degree in the Occupy Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public intellectuals, they need to listen to young people who are producing a new language in order to talk about inequality and power relations, attempting to create alternative democratic public spaces, rethinking the very nature of politics, and asking serious questions about what democracy is and why it no longer exists in many neoliberal societies. These young people who are protesting the 1 recognize that they have been written out of the discourses of justice, equality and democracy and are not only resisting how neoliberalism has made them expendable, they are arguing for a collective future very different from the one that is on display in the current political and economic systems in which they feel trapped. These brave youth are insisting that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world around them.
32		-
33		-Capitalism is the root cause of all oppression, meaning it is the ultimate restrictor of voices. Thus, combatting capitalist structures logically comes prior to all other frameworks. McLaren 2
34		-For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists should refuse to accept—namely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism's logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion people—almost half of the world's population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin's call for a collective socialist vision necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism that informs the ‘politics of difference.’ It also requires challenging the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of contemporary ‘radical’ theory, pedagogy and politics. In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political economy approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx's notion of ‘unity in difference’ in which people share widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc.
35		-
36		-Focus on representations and discourse fails to recognize power structures and hierarchies that require institutional reform. Only focusing on higher education can bring about useful pedagogy that allows us to combat oppressive institutions. Giroux 06
37		-Abstracted from the ideal of public commitment, the new authoritarianism represents a political and economic practice and form of militarism that loosens the connections among substantive democracy, critical agency, and critical education. In opposition to the rising tide of authoritarianism, educators across the globe must make a case for linking learning to progressive social change while struggling to pluralize and critically engage the diverse sites where public pedagogy takes place. In part, this suggests forming alliances that can make sure every sphere of social life is recognized as an important site of the political, social, and cultural struggle that is so crucial to any attempt to forge the knowledge, identifications, effective investments, and social relations that constitute political subjects and social agents capable of energizing and spreading the basis for a substantive global democracy. Such circumstances require that pedagogy must be embraced as a moral and political practice, one that is directive and not dogmatic, an outgrowth of struggles designed to resist the increasing depoliticization of political culture that is the hallmark of the current Bush revolution. Education is the terrain where consciousness is shaped, needs are constructed, and the capacity for individual self-reflection and broad social change is nurtured and produced. Education has assumed an unparalleled significance in shaping the language, values, and ideologies that legitimize the structures and organizations that support the imperatives of global capitalism. Efforts to reduce it to a technique or methodology set aside, education remains a crucial site for the production and struggle over those pedagogical and political conditions that provide the possibilities for people to develop forms of agency that enable them individually and collectively to intervene in the processes through which the material relations of power shape the meaning and practices of their everyday lives. Within the current historical context, struggles over power take on a symbolic and discursive as well as a material and institutional form. The struggle over education is about more than the struggle over meaning and identity; it is also about how meaning, knowledge, and values are produced, authorized, and made operational within economic and structural relations of power. Education is not at odds with politics; it is an important and crucial element in any definition of the political and offers not only the theoretical tools for a systematic critique of authoritarianism but also a language of possibility for creating actual movements for democratic social change and a new biopolitics that affirms life rather than death, shared responsibility rather than shared fears, and engaged citizenship rather than the stripped-down values of consumerism. At stake here is combining symbolic forms and processes conducive to democratization with broader social contexts and the institutional formations of power itself. The key point here is to understand and engage educational and pedagogical practices from the point of view of how they are bound up with larger relations of power. Educators, students, and parents need to be clearer about how power works through and in texts, representations, and discourses, while at the same time recognizing that power cannot be limited to the study of representations and discourses, even at the level of public policy. Changing consciousness is not the same as altering the institutional basis of oppression; at the same time, institutional reform cannot take place without a change in consciousness capable of recognizing not only injustice but also the very possibility for reform, the capacity to reinvent the conditions End Page 176 and practices that make a more just future possible. In addition, it is crucial to raise questions about the relationship between pedagogy and civic culture, on the one hand, and what it takes for individuals and social groups to believe that they have any responsibility whatsoever even to address the realities of class, race, gender, and other specific forms of domination, on the other hand. For too long, the progressives have ignored that the strategic dimension of politics is inextricably connected to questions of critical education and pedagogy, to what it means to acknowledge that education is always tangled up with power, ideologies, values, and the acquisition of both particular forms of agency and specific visions of the future. The primacy of critical pedagogy to politics, social change, and the radical imagination in such dark times is dramatically captured by the internationally renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. He writes, Adverse odds may be overwhelming, and yet a democratic (or, as Cornelius Castoriadis would say, an autonomous) society knows of no substitute for education and self-education as a means to influence the turn of events that can be squared with its own nature, while that nature cannot be preserved for long without "critical pedagogy"—is an education sharpening its critical edge, "making society feel guilty" and "stirring things up" through stirring human consciences. The fates of freedom, of democracy that makes it possible while being made possible by it, and of education that breeds dissatisfaction with the level of both freedom and democracy achieved thus far, are inextricably connected and not to be detached from one another. One may view that intimate connection as another specimen of a vicious circle—but it is within that circle that human hopes and the chances of humanity are inscribed, and can be nowhere else.

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-2017-02-05 19:30:47.0

Judge

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-John Overing

Opponent

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Wesley Carter

ParentRound

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-24

Round

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-6

Team

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Westview Sudhakar Aff

Title

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Neolib AC

Tournament

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Golden Desert