Assassins of Memory: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure

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In this book, Henry A. Giroux addresses the attacks on student protesters speaking up against the war on Gaza, and connects this with wider attacks on critical education and democracy. He details the ongoing scholasticide taking place in Palestine, the systematic attacks by the Israeli military on schools, teachers and museums, and argues that they represent the extreme endpoint of a broader, insidious campaign aimed at crushing dissent across universities in the United States, Europe, and beyond. Books are banned, student protesters face police brutality, faculty are purged, history is whitewashed, and faculty are restricted from teaching certain content in the classroom.

Throughout the book he draws links between authoritarianism and education, the war on youth, the politics of higher education, the politics of mass media, as well as what he has termed organized forgetting. He closes the book by arguing that we live in an era where historical amnesia has been weaponized, where many young people are denied the histories that allow them to narrate their own experiences and assert modes of self-reflection they can claim as their own.

Author Bio

Henry A. Giroux holds the Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. His recent books include The Burden of Conscience (2025), Insurrections (2023), Pedagogy of Resistance (2022), Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy (2021) and On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd Edition (2020), all published by Bloomsbury.