Utopian Promises And Dystopian Futures: Totalitarianism, Counter-Hegemony, And The Limits Of Democratic Education

by Eric J. Weiner In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that…one could make people believe the most…
Dead Teachers, Live Pedagogies And The Reanimation Of Hope

by Eric J. Weiner January, 2022. East End, Long Island, NY. It’s getting colder. I just recovered from a bout with COVID. I am sitting around the fire pit sipping tequila, drinking homemade bone broth from a mug, and watching lists of very important dead people, ripped from various newspapers and magazines, burn in the…
Learning To Listen

by Eric J. Weiner We find our voice in solitude, and we bring it to public and private conversations that enrich our capacity for self-reflection. Now that circle has been disrupted; there is a crisis in our capacity to be alone and together. But we are in flight from those face-t0-face conversations that enrich our…
The Radical Educational Imagination Of Stanley Aronowitz

by Eric J. Weiner He was both a street fighter and a hard-boiled romantic for whom the radical imagination was at the heart of a politics that mattered, and he was one of few great intellectuals I knew who took education seriously as a political endeavor. —Henry Giroux On August 16, 2021, Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished…
Representations of Dissent

by Eric J. Weiner Ghazal: India’s Season of Dissent by Karthika Naïr[1] This year, this night, this hour, rise to salute the season of dissent. Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims—Indians, all—seek their nation of dissent. We the people of…they chant: the mantra that birthed a republic. Even my distant eyes echo flares from this beacon of dissent.…
9/11/01: A Memoir

by Eric J. Weiner The chill in the early morning air hinted of autumn, yet the intensity of the rising sun promised summer heat. Black Tupelo and Red Maple leaves teased memories of fall with premature wisps of yellow and orange. The sky was a depthless cobalt blue, its crystallinity making everything and everyone shimmer.…
The Work Of Intellectuals

by Eric J. Weiner There are few people who spend as much time writing, thinking, and talking about the value of the work they do than intellectuals. Even as some noted intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Thomas Sowell bristle at the term intellectual to describe who they are and what they do, they among many…
Framing Critical Race Theory: Ideology, Schooling And The Production Of Ignorance

by Eric J. Weiner White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of Black people—a tremendous uneasiness. They don’t know what the Black face hides. They’re sure it’s hiding something. What it’s hiding is American history. What it’s hiding is what white people know they have done, and what…
Other People’s Children, Part 2: Toward A Transnational, Translingual, And Transcultural Border Pedagogy

by Eric J. Weiner Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold… “The Second Coming” William Butler Yeats The overwhelming majority of pre-service and in-service teachers I have worked with over the past two decades believe that they should, first and foremost, love,…
Other People’s Children: The Struggle for Moral Clarity At The Border/Hijos De Otras Personas: La Lucha Por La Claridad Moral En La Frontera

by Eric J. Weiner Border culture is a project of ‘redefinition’ that conceives of the border not only as the limits of two countries, but also as a cardinal intersection of many realities. In this sense, the border is not an abyss that will have to save us from threatening otherness, but a place where…
Radical Education And The Sublimation Of The Erotic Imagination

by Eric J. Weiner Through the academic grapevine, it came; a story of an eminent sociologist who argued that he wouldn’t want to work with graduate students who he couldn’t fuck. The infamous statement was allegedly said in a faculty meeting in the 1990s at a progressive urban university where they were considering an official…
On The Concept Of Education

by Eric J. Weiner In 1940, at the height of Hitler’s invasion of Western Europe, Walter Benjamin, from Vichy France wrote, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.”[1] In…
The Bigger Lie

by Eric J. Weiner There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now. —James Baldwin Before the pomp and circumstance of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s inauguration officially framed the white supremacist insurrection at the Capitol on January…
What’s The Plan? An Open Letter To Secretary Of Education, Dr. Miguel Cardona

by Eric J. Weiner Dear Dr. Cardona: The violent, insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 was due, in part, to the success of the Nation’s system of public education, not its failure. Since Ronald Reagan announced in 1981 that “government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem,”…
Looking Back, Paying It Forward: A Shout-Out To My Mentors

by Eric J. Weiner The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves. — Steven Spielberg All mentors teach, but not all teachers become mentors. Mentors nurture, guide, teach, support, protect, challenge, help, listen, defend, critique, and unselfishly share their knowledge, time, and…
From Pain To Possibility: Critical Education And The Struggle to Save Democracy

by Eric J. Weiner Ours, like the moments after the Civil War and Reconstruction and after the civil rights movement, requires a different kind of thinking, a different kind of resiliency, or else we succumb to madness or resignation. —Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Those convictions and motives, upon which the Nazi regime drew, no longer…
Neo-Fascism, Or The Political Logic of Neoliberalism

by Eric J. Weiner In a recent article in The Atlantic, Shadi Hamid, contributing writer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, states reproachfully that “Donald Trump’s election (in 2016) led to a whole cottage industry of thinking that fascism is near, right here at home.” For many scholars and writers in this proverbial “cottage…
History Under Siege: Trumpism, Counter-Memory and Schooling

by Eric J. Weiner Today in the United States is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a time to bear witness and remember the savagery of Christopher Columbus and other European explorers when they first encountered indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. It’s also a day to recognize and celebrate the courage, knowledges, and cultures of indigenous peoples throughout…
Schooling And The Ideology of White Supremacy

by Eric J. Weiner If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck. Over the course of two days in early September, the Trump administration quietly formalized its commitment to the ideology of white supremacy within the context of schooling and public education. In two…