Current neo-liberal policies have resulted in economic Darwinism that promotes personal interest through abusive individualism and selfishness. On the other hand, their strategies stimulate a kind of social amnesia that erases critical thinking, historical analysis and any notion of broader systemic relationships: educational reforms substitute critical learning for expertise in testing, data memorization. and the non-questioning of knowledge or authority.

This pedagogy of ignorance driven by the collapse and decay of the current democratic paradigm has had a very negative impact on education. Henry Giroux intends in this essay to direct a critical look at the educational system, especially in higher education in the United States. Likewise, the reader will find in these pages a scathing analysis not only of the American universities and their administrators, academics and intellectuals in general, but about the neoliberal governments and the establishment that promote them. The war of neoliberalism against higher education is an invitation to reflect on the social and political reality worldwide, as well as our own social and educational system, in which values ​​such as social responsibility, community and common good are so absent .