Eric J. Weiner is Professor of Theoretical Foundations of Critical Education and Cultural Studies in the department of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University in New Jersey. His work explores the intersectionality of power, language, aesthetics, ideology, creativity, and education. He has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals, three books of poetry, and four single-authored books. His last book, Teachable Moments: Educated Hope in Times of Crisis (Dio Press, 2021) is a collection of essays that examine what it means to critically learn from everyday experiences. The central idea that links all of the disparate essays is how hope for a better future is made manifest in our capacity to think critically about the past and present. He is also an artist, avid biker, tattoo collector, tequila connoisseur, and amateur landscaper. He lives in New York City and East Hampton, NY. Email: ericjonweiner [at] gmail.com
by Eric J. Weiner One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn’t know. —Albert Camus From a Deweyan perspective, public education’s central role in a democracy is to provide the conditions for students to learn the skills, knowledge, and habits of mind that are essential for democratic life. For Dewey, democracy is a form…
by Eric J. Weiner Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career. –C. Wright Mills In 2001, I felt lucky to get a tenure-track job in the College of Education and Human Services (CEHS) at Montclair State University (MSU) in New Jersey. Not only was the university a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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.…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,”…
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…
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…
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…
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…