The world runs amok as global carpetbaggers looking to become the world‰s latest centillionaires take advantage of the results of increasing rights for business owners worldwideÖprivatization, budget cuts and labor ‹flexibilityŠ due to the engineered absence of government constraint on the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services brought about by global neoliberal economy policies. Stacking the shelves of Planet Mall with goods shaped for designer lifestyles becomes the operative strategy. Following in the wake of push-cart, no-frills, bootstrap capitalism is the cultural flotsam and jetsam produced by the Starbucking and Wal-Marting of the global landscape, as the tyranny of the market ruthlessly subjects labor to its regulatory forces of social and cultural reproduction in the unsus-tainable precincts of the capitalist market.

Under the tutelage of neoliberialism‰s economic engineers, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Von Hayek, the 1980s and 1990s became a showcase for an orchestrated conservative and right-wing backlash against the civil rights of working-class minority groups, immigrants, women, and children. Recently in the United States we have witnessed a series of democratic ‹victoriesŠ for proponents of Propositions 21, 209, and 227 in California, propositions aimed at welfare ‹reformŠ and managed ‹careŠ as well as increasing the executions of criminals and massively expanding the prison industry.

It is not surprising that the privatization of health care, dwindling social services for the poor, and rumors of the marriage between Social Security and Wall Street coincide with the stagnation of wage growth and declining economic prosperity for most working-class men, women, and children. These recent trends are also associated with the shrinking middle-class in the United States. Given such a scenario, democracy seems perilously out of reach. Indeed, the frontiers of human freedom are being pushed back as ‹freeŠ market forces are being pushed forward.

A significant part of the neo-liberal agenda has been directed at the ‹businessŠ of educationÖ literally. We are referring to the growing commercialization and corp-oratization of public schools, which is now at the center of much-heated public debate and controversy. Coca-Cola, McDonald‰s, and Exxon are among a long list of corporations who are providing financial help to some of the nation‰s 80,000 public schools. Indeed, this is the case for many urban school districts forced to accept corporate funding because of a shortage of qualified teachers, school textbooks, resources, and materials.

Captivated by new forms of media technology and popular culture, students are faced with the daunting task of becoming multi-literate. In addition to becoming literate in the traditional sense of displaying verbal and written comprehension, students are engaged (often with the help of their teachers) in decoding and analyzing the meanings and messages generated by advertising, commercial, and film industries. In other words, students realize even before many professional educators that the media are excellent teachers; they serve society as forms of ‹perpetual pedagogyŠ or pedagogy in constant motion. We use this term to highlight the idea that signs, symbols, and representations of all kinds are produced all the time by both print technology as well as the electronic media. These representations are produced in specific contexts within certain social relations of production. While their meanings are never ësecured‰ once and for all, since they are read differently by different people with different backgrounds and life histories, they are none the less meant to teach us something. They both reinforce established meanings and ideological interests as well as create new ones. And while all representations occur in an arena of contestation (sometimes called the ‹culture warsŠ) they do serve the interests of dominant groups, including corporations. However, part of the corporate agenda has been to turn students into passive consumer-citizens by replacing their values and beliefs with a pre-packaged menu of pro-consumption, pro-business ideological positions that gives ballast to the corporate agenda and masks its role in the everyday value-formation of students‰ lives.

It is not uncommon these days to see school buses in certain states covered with advertisements for Burger King and Wendy‰s fast food chain restaurants. It has become fashionable for elementary schoolchildren carry books wrapped in free book covers plastered with ads for Kellogg‰s Pop-Tarts and Fox TV personalities. School districts have granted Coca-Cola and Pepsi exclusive contracts to sell their products in schools. In health education classes students are taught nutrition by the Hershey Corporation that includes a discussion on the important place of chocolate in a balanced diet. A classroom business course teaches students to value work by exploring how McDonald‰s restaurants are operated and what skills are needed to become a successful McDonald‰s manager, and provides instructions on how to apply for a job at McDonald‰s. Ecological and environmental education now involves students learning ecology from a ‹Life of an AntŠ poster sponsored by Skittles candy and an environmental curriculum video produced by Shell Oil that concentrates on the virtues of the external combustion engine.

In the wake of the widespread corporate assault on public schooling, social justice educators face the insurmountable challenge of educating students for critical citizenship. We want to sketch in broad strokes a number of fundamental steps teachers can take in preparing students to become critically literate. We locate critical literacy in a broader framework that we refer to as the development of critical citizenship.

A major step in preparing students to become critically literate is not only to provide them with meaningful learning experiences (i.e., through the use of numerical literacy, computer literacy, cultural literacy, and critical literacy skills), but to validate and legitimate the experiences that students bring into the classroom from their everyday lives. Student experiences can be linked to a theme-based curricula designed to facilitate economic literacy, media literacy, eco-literacy, consumer literacy, and other literacies linked to social and educational policies motored by unregulated global capitalism.

Secondly, social justice educators can offer students a ‹language of critiqueŠ and a ‹language of possibility,Š so that they can conceptualize, analyze, theorize, and critically reflect upon their experiences. Radical educator Henry Giroux uses the term ‹language of critiqueŠ to refer to developing a theoretical vocabulary and a set of analytical skills drawn from mainly the disciplines of sociology, critical theory, and cultural studies. The term ‹language of possibilityŠ refers to developing a vision of a better world by bringing theory into practice (praxis). In other words, it refers to using the new sets of analytical skills from the social sciences to interrogate and transform the social conditions that have socially, culturally, and historically produced one‰s individual and collective experiences.

The recognition of the dialectical unity between theory and practice, and action and reflection, is a third step social justice educators can undertake to empower students. Here we make a crucial distinction between reflection and critical reflection. While the former is related to students‰ awareness of their concrete social and economic circumstances, the latter deals with the investigation of their social location in the world as well as their relationship with the world. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian critical educator, refers to this as a ‹radical form of being,Š which he associates with ‹beings that not only know, but know that they know.Š

This brings us to the action dimension of critical literacyÖwhat we refer to as praxis-oriented pedagogy. Praxis-oriented pedagogy bridges the gap between critical knowledge and social practice. This involves bringing theory into the streets. It includes organizing and mobilizing students, parents, teachers at the community level, and linking their struggles to larger national and international struggles.

Given the pivotal role that critical literacy can play in the daily lives of students, a question many social justice educators may raise has to do with the concrete applications of critical literacy in their classrooms.

For example, social justice educators can incorporate economic literacy as part of teaching critical literacy. A useful resource guide in teaching economic literacy is Stud Terkel‰s Working: A Teaching Guide by Rick Ayers used in conjunction with Stud Terkel‰s nationally acclaimed book, Working. Terkel‰s book is an ethnographic account of the lives of working men and women. In his book, Terkel interviews workers about job security, workplace safety, economic opportunity, and whether or not they find personal fulfillment and meaning in the work they perform.

Following the ideas developed by Terkel, teachers can direct students in interviewing family members, friends, and people who make up their local neighborhood. Students investigate not only the types of jobs that exist in their community, but also the workplace conditions that exist, including terms of employment, salary ranges, and medical and dental benefits. Students can communicate through the Internet with students undertaking the same or similar projects who live in neighboring communities and those who live in neighborhoods with widely divergent socio-economic conditions. Students can then link job conditions to related socio-political issues affecting their communities. In Los Angeles they could include complications arising from Propositions 21, 227,and 209, racial profiling by the police, the treatment of the homeless, slave labor in sweatshops, and the treatment of undocumented immigrants. These conditions can then be traced to economic initiatives put forward by both Democrats and Republicans at both state and federal levels. Students can then analyze these initiatives in the light of competing economic philosophies (i.e., socialist, green, reform). Students can also interview the ‹ownersŠ as well as the ‹producersŠ of the various businesses that exist in their neighborhoods and raise issues that affect people‰s working and non-working lives.

This activity and its variations can encourage students to link local issues with the wider arena of social life. Students will raise a number of critical questions: Why is there a shortage of community centers in some neighborhoods and not in others? How can public transportation be made more accessible? Why is there a large police presence in some communities for the purpose of repression and other forms of police presence in the gated communities for the purpose of protection? Why is there a larger concentration of liquor stores in some communities and virtually none in other communities?

Preparing students for critical citizenship through critical literacy deepens the roots of democracy by encouraging students to actively participate in public discourses and debates over social, economic, and political issues that affect everyday life in their own and neighboring communities. In this way, students can acquire the civic courage and moral responsibility to participate in democratic life as critical social agents, becoming authors of their own history rather than being written off by history.