• DOI:10.1215/01903659-28-3-61
• Corpus ID: 154129377

Mis/Education and Zero Tolerance: Disposable Youth and the Politics of Domestic Militarization

@article{Giroux2001MisEducationAZ,
  title={Mis/Education and Zero Tolerance: Disposable Youth and the Politics of Domestic Militarization},
  author={Henry A. Giroux},
  journal={boundary 2},
  year={2001},
  volume={28},
  pages={61 - 94}
}

• Henry A. Giroux
• Published 1 October 2001
• Sociology, Political Science
• boundary 2

There is growing evidence in American life that citizenship is being further emptied of any critical social and political content. Of course, citizenship itself is a problematic and contested concept; even in its best moments historically, when it was strongly aligned with concerns for human rights, equality, justice, and freedom as social provisions, it never completely escaped from the exclusionary legacies of class, gender, and racial inequality.1 Yet, in spite of such drawbacks, social citizenship contained, even within the watered-down version characteristic of liberal democracy, the possibility for both reflecting critically on its own limitations and implementing the promises of radical democracy. Accentuating the importance of public issues, social citizenship provided a referent, however limited, for individuals to think of themselves as active citizens and not merely as taxpayers and homeowners. Moreover, as the site of many diverse struggles, citizenship often brought to the fore models of political agency in which people were encour-