I’ve been really impressed with this short but powerful interview with Henry Giroux. In a ten minute tour-de-force he takes on education, politics, social media, democracy, capitalism, the future and the possibilities of political activities. He argues that we need to pay attention to the role that education plays, how it engages with power and politics and to avoid lazy assumptions that any form of education is emancipatory or that it can ever be neutral and value free.

So much of what he says is highly relevant for career guidance (unsurprisingly, because career guidance is fundamentally a form of education that is particularly concerned with the future). The discussion of neutrality is particularly relevant to those who claim that career guidance can be impartial and that it should stand outside of politics. Inevitably the futures that we present and the possibilities that we acknowledge and encourage are always shot through with ideology and a relationship to existing structures of power.

I’ll leave you to judge for yourself. I’d love to hear what people make of this in the comments to this piece.

So, here is ten minutes of turbo charged Henry Giroux…