September, 08 2009, 05:32pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
Is the Purpose of Education to Make Money?
HENRY GIROUX, https://www.henryagiroux.com
WASHINGTON
HENRY GIROUX, https://www.henryagiroux.com
Giroux's books include the recently-released Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? and The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. He just wrote the piece "The Corporate Stranglehold on Education,"
which states: "In the age of money and profit, academic subjects gain
stature almost exclusively through their exchange value on the market.
Twice as many students major in business studies than in any other
major. The liberal arts increasingly appear to be merely ornamental, a
dying vestige of an age not dominated by Gilded Age excess and
disposability. Whereas the university was once prized as a place where
students learned how to be engaged citizens educated in the knowledge,
skills, values, and virtues of democracy, today they are trained to be
workers and adept consumers. Educational value is now measured
according to cost/benefit formulas, and the only rationality that
matters is one of economic exchange."
Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada.
A nationwide consortium, the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA) represents an unprecedented effort to bring other voices to the mass-media table often dominated by a few major think tanks. IPA works to broaden public discourse in mainstream media, while building communication with alternative media outlets and grassroots activists.
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According to a White House fact sheet, those who received commutations "have been serving their sentences at home for at least one year under the Covid-era CARES Act," a law that extended the amount of time in which people could be placed in home confinement to reduce the spread of the virus in prisons.
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