I argue that turning other people's oppression into catastrophic impacts, assuming state authority through fiat, and presenting a small government intervention as rescue is a neoliberal political practice. The performance makes suffering available for competitive use while granting the state the authority to redeem it. People enter the argument as populations to be saved, and the state enters as the actor entitled to save them. The resulting victory rewards the management of oppression while leaving the relations that produce it in place. This is the political education I challenge.
The same logic reaches beyond debate. When a limited political victory is sold as deliverance from a crisis, the institutions that organize exploitation receive credit for managing its consequences. A concession becomes a reason to stop demanding structural change. Those living with the crisis are asked to recognize the competence of the system rather than build the collective power to confront it. Neoliberalism reproduces itself through this conversion of political struggle into a demonstration that existing authorities can administer their own damage.
Critical education is central to breaking that cycle. It gives people the intellectual and relational resources to connect personal suffering to institutional power, reject the promise of rescue, and organize around shared conditions. We must protect higher education as a place where this work can develop, and connect it to movements beyond the campus. A classroom, a debate team, a union meeting, or a neighborhood group can become a pocket of change through which people learn to act together. The transition begins when those relationships develop into sustained collective struggle. Giroux's call to connect democratic education with an alliance of movements pursuing democratic socialism gives this transition an explicit political direction (Sardoč, 2018, pp. 102–106).
We have a moral obligation to pursue that struggle even when it risks failure. The suffering reproduced by existing institutions continues while we wait for certainty. Demanding a guaranteed alternative before confronting domination gives the existing system permission to continue its devastation. Critical praxis breaks with that permission by joining reflection to action and making political responsibility a shared undertaking. Education must prepare people to participate in this work, rather than train them to mistake a successful performance of governance for liberation.
I develop this argument through critical pedagogy, political theory, and research on collective action, informed by my experience participating in debate and coaching. My claim is that the relationship among impact construction, state role play, and competitive reward reproduces neoliberal political agency. The alternative begins in the relationships we are already making: how we represent suffering, listen to others, investigate power, and organize together. These practices determine whether education teaches us to administer the existing order or equips us to challenge it.
Neoliberalism organizes how social problems become intelligible
I use neoliberalism to describe a historically specific political project and a way of governing that extends market competition, private investment, and economic performance into areas of life that cannot adequately be judged by those standards alone. Harvey (2005) emphasizes the restructuring of institutions around market freedoms and the restoration or consolidation of class power. Brown (2015) examines how neoliberal reason recasts democratic subjects and institutions in economic terms. These accounts direct attention to ownership and political authority as well as to the habits through which people come to understand themselves.
The state is central to this project. Public power establishes property rights, enforces contracts, organizes markets, and protects investment against democratic demands. Slobodian's (2018) history examines efforts to insulate the world economy from democratic interference. Alami et al. (2024) likewise argue that resurgent state capitalism and neoliberalism can coexist and reinforce one another. State intervention can organize and protect the conditions of accumulation. Its political meaning depends on the power it sustains, including who controls essential resources and whose decisions the public must live with.
Rutar (2023) presents a challenge to sweeping accounts of neoliberalism by reviewing heterogeneous outcomes in development, inequality, and democracy. My response concerns the standard by which those outcomes are judged. Measures of economic freedom and growth do not settle the democratic question Brown (2015) raises about the conversion of political life into economic reasoning. A policy can improve a measured outcome while preserving the power to determine whose needs count. The criticism developed here targets that relation: public goods subordinated to accumulation, collective risks assigned to individuals, and democratic demands restricted to what existing owners and investors will accept.
Even the economic justification for these arrangements is contested. Ostry et al. (2016), writing in the International Monetary Fund's Finance & Development, question aspects of capital-account liberalization and fiscal consolidation, including their distributional consequences. Their examination of these policies challenges the presentation of market discipline as a self-evident public benefit. Inequality and insecurity belong within the evaluation of economic policy, rather than outside it as unfortunate costs to be managed afterward. A critique that begins with people's conditions of life exposes what the language of necessity asks them to endure.
The educational consequence is a narrowing of what appears politically possible. When insecurity is understood as a deficit in personal investment, the response becomes improving the individual. When that same insecurity is investigated through labor conditions, ownership, and public provision, collective demands become possible. Brown's (2015) account of human capital helps explain the first orientation. Critical education develops the second by making the institutions behind suffering available for investigation and contestation. Explanations matter because they shape which forms of action people can imagine, justify, and undertake together.
Critical education develops the capacity to act together
Freire (1970/2000) understands praxis through the relationship between reflection and action directed at transforming the world. His criticism of the banking model of education challenges the treatment of learners as passive recipients of knowledge. For this article, the practical consequence is that students need opportunities to investigate problems with others, question the authority of inherited explanations, and connect inquiry to action. An instructor who deposits the correct antineoliberal position into students would reproduce the hierarchy this approach seeks to challenge.
Giroux (2024) places critical pedagogy within struggles over agency, democratic life, and the market-oriented reorganization of education. His work helps explain why education is a political issue even when a curriculum presents itself as neutral preparation for employment. Institutions teach through what they reward and make possible as well as through the subjects they assign. When higher education treats competitive performance and employability as its overriding purposes, collective responsibility becomes harder to sustain as an educational aim. Protecting critical education requires defending the time and freedom to ask what those purposes leave out.
hooks (1994) connects engaged pedagogy to education as a practice of freedom. Her account challenges the separation of intellectual work from the lives and relationships through which learning occurs. That commitment requires taking students seriously as participants who contribute knowledge, question a teacher's assumptions, and disagree with one another. It also demands that we confront the authority attached to the institution's preferred forms of speech. Evidence and reasoning should become resources people can use together, rather than instruments through which already privileged speakers secure control of the conversation.
Education becomes politically useful when an isolated experience becomes a question people can investigate together. Students discussing rising tuition can examine an institution's budget and decision-making structure. Workers discussing insecurity can compare employment arrangements and learn how collective bargaining operates. Tenants can connect repeated maintenance problems to ownership and enforcement. I propose these forms of inquiry because they move people toward an account of their shared conditions and the institutions responsible for them. The educational task is to develop the knowledge and relationships through which they can act on that account.
Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury (2025) develop an antiracist scholar-activist pedagogy through interviews with 29 scholar-activists in British universities. Their framework connects critical understanding and dialogical teaching with challenges to hierarchy and relationships beyond the university. It places educational work in an active relationship with communities and social movements. That relationship is essential to the political project defended here. Communities must be participants in the production and use of knowledge, with authority over the questions being asked and the work undertaken in their name.
Education supplies a foundation for democratic transition by developing people's capacity to identify a shared problem and confront it together. Concentrated wealth, legal restrictions, and material dependence make organization necessary. A politically literate community needs resources and institutions through which to exert pressure, while a movement needs collective learning to keep authority from concentrating among a few knowledgeable members. Critical inquiry and collective organization belong to the same struggle. Each develops capacities the other requires.
The reach of education also exceeds the classroom. Giroux (2023) examines the pedagogical force of public culture, media, and political communication. In his earlier interview with Sardoč (2018, pp. 98–99), Giroux argues that neoliberalism works as a public pedagogy, teaching market values and competitive identities across institutions, digital platforms, and everyday life. This account makes the struggle over education central to the struggle over power. People learn what counts as normal, possible, or threatening through encounters far beyond formal schooling. A movement can challenge those lessons through public argument and collective practice, while a university can help people analyze how they operate. Debate belongs within this struggle because its rules teach participants what political agency looks like and whose conduct deserves recognition.
Protecting higher education means changing what it makes possible
Higher education matters because it can sustain research, sustained disagreement, and relationships that do not have to justify themselves through an immediate commercial return. Those capacities give students and communities places to examine institutions that shape their lives. Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) analyze the development of an academic capitalist knowledge and learning regime, including the organizational connections through which universities enter markets. Their account helps locate the problem in institutional arrangements rather than in a few administrators' attitudes. The issue is how priorities become embedded in funding, governance, and the production of knowledge.
Recent threats to academic freedom give this defense urgency. The Academic Freedom Index 2026 update reports substantial and statistically significant declines in 50 countries between 2015 and 2025, alongside improvements in nine (Kinzelbach et al., 2026). These expert-coded findings document the erosion of a material condition of critical education: the freedom to investigate and challenge authority. Independent inquiry requires institutions capable of protecting it. Defending that freedom is part of the political struggle over who controls knowledge and what society is permitted to question.
Giroux and DiMaggio (2024) connect attacks on critical education with authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and white supremacy. Their analysis brings racial and cultural domination directly into the struggle over democratic education. These relations organize whose knowledge is credible, whose histories can be taught, and whose claims deserve a public hearing. Their interaction with market-oriented institutions makes the defense of education more urgent. Protecting public inquiry requires confronting the economic and political forces that seek to restrict it.
Defending higher education also requires confronting domination inside the university. Class exclusion, racial hierarchy, precarious employment, and professional authority that discounts community knowledge undermine its democratic purposes. The people whose work sustains the institution should have power over the conditions under which that work occurs. Critical education must therefore make the university itself available for investigation. Its public language should be tested against its budgets, employment practices, and distribution of decision-making authority.
We must protect the material conditions of independent inquiry: affordable access, stable support for teaching and research, meaningful participation in institutional decisions, and academic freedom that protects disagreement. These commitments expand the time, security, and authority people need to participate in collective life. A campus that celebrates critical thinking while pricing students out of education or exposing teachers to retaliation for challenging power betrays that purpose. The defense of higher education must reach the conditions that determine who can remain there and what they are free to do.
A pocket of change must therefore have some capacity to persist. A reading group may need an accessible room and a schedule that working students can attend. A community research partnership may need continuity beyond a semester and a process through which partners can refuse a project. A student organization may need protection from retaliation and access to institutional records. These modest arrangements matter because they determine whether criticism becomes a repeatable collective practice. Their value is not measured by whether they immediately resemble a transformed society.
The university should also remain connected to educational work outside its boundaries. Workers, neighborhood organizations, and social movements produce knowledge that credentialed institutions can ignore. A campus partnership should contribute resources without assuming the right to direct a community's priorities. Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury (2025) help clarify that responsibility through their account of scholar-activism. Protecting higher education is defensible when it expands the public capacity to inquire and organize, not when it protects a monopoly on who is allowed to know.
Giroux connects democratic education to democratic socialism
Giroux gives this defense of education a political direction that I take as central to the alternative. In Sardoč's (2018, p. 106) interview, he calls for rejecting the identification of capitalism with democracy, renewing a commitment to democratic socialism, and building political formations through an alliance of diverse social movements. Education belongs at the center of that struggle because it helps people understand domination and develop the capacity to oppose it. This provides a way to connect the pockets of change defended here. Their task is to build the collective power through which people can contest the institutions organizing their lives and extend democratic control over their shared conditions.
The alternative begins with education as a public good and a right. Giroux calls for defending higher education as a democratic public sphere and the classroom as a place for dialogue, critical inquiry, and the exercise of civic courage. He connects that defense to organized struggles against defunding and to redirecting resources from military and incarceration budgets toward education (Sardoč, 2018, pp. 102–103). These demands give the defense of education material content. A democratic public sphere requires resources that allow people to enter it, remain there, and challenge the authorities controlling it. We must fight over those resources and over who has the power to decide their use.
Giroux also places ethics, civic literacy, social responsibility, and compassion at the center of learning (Sardoč, 2018, p. 103). I take this as a demand to change how people become present to one another in education. An account of oppression should create an obligation to understand the people living through it and the relations producing it. Those people must be able to contest how their lives are represented and what is proposed in their name. The ethical imagination develops through this responsibility to others. It is diminished when their suffering becomes useful primarily because it makes our own argument more competitive.
His account of literacy reaches across written, visual, and digital culture. Students should learn to produce culture and interrogate the forces shaping it, developing the ability to move between forms of knowledge rather than simply consume information (Sardoč, 2018, p. 103). That demand has direct consequences for debate. Reading a source must involve investigating how it frames a problem, whose experience it makes visible, and what political possibilities its language permits. We should use research to develop public explanations and shared inquiry that others can challenge. A piece of evidence should remain accountable to its meaning after it becomes useful to our position.
The people teaching this work also need the power to sustain it. Giroux calls for faculty control over their labor, participation in governance, tenure-track employment, and protections for academic freedom and free speech (Sardoč, 2018, p. 103). These conditions determine whether an educator can challenge institutional priorities without being made disposable. A university cannot credibly cultivate democratic agency while demanding obedience from precarious workers. Defending critical education therefore includes organizing around employment and governance, with the people doing the work exercising authority over its conditions.
Giroux's call for an alliance of movements makes the relationship between these educational struggles and broader transformation explicit (Sardoč, 2018, p. 106). I propose building that relationship through sustained work among campus groups, worker organizations, tenant associations, and other communities confronting shared institutions. Participants can connect their research, develop common demands, and decide together how to confront the power those demands challenge. They must retain the ability to criticize the alliance's direction and change its practices. This is how the democratic socialist horizon becomes a task people can begin: protect spaces for collective learning, organize the people connected through them, and build the power to transform the institutions they confront.
Interpersonal relationships build the foundations of collective power
In the interview Henry Giroux on the Rise of Neoliberalism, Giroux describes neoliberalism as an assault on communal relationships and the public spaces that sustain democratic life. He connects private suffering to systemic conditions and makes education central to helping people recognize that human-made institutions can be changed through collective action (Nevradakis, 2014). I take this as a starting point for the alternative: people must be able to encounter one another as participants in a shared political struggle. A conversation can interrupt the isolation that teaches each person to experience exploitation as a private failure. Critical inquiry can turn that encounter toward the institutions producing the harm.
Giroux also insists that education develop into organized confrontation. He calls for an international left, a shared political vision connecting different groups, and enduring organizations with resources and the collective capacity to act (Nevradakis, 2014). The interpersonal beginning acquires political force through this movement outward. Relationships give people somewhere to begin; organization gives them a means to sustain the struggle and confront power beyond the immediate encounter. I defend an alternative that joins these tasks. The people learning to act together must build connections capable of challenging the institutions that shape their lives.
The everyday encounters already taking place on campus provide an immediate ground for this work. When students compare experiences of debt, or instructors discuss insecure employment, they can investigate the decisions producing those conditions and identify people with whom to act. The next steps require shared research, meetings, and responsibility for carrying a demand forward. I propose connecting these groups with existing worker and community organizations so that an initial conversation develops continuity and power. We can begin this work within the relationships we already have, then build the organization needed to confront the institutions that shape them.
The trust required for this work develops as people compare experiences, test explanations, and recognize one another as participants in a shared struggle. Van Zomeren et al. (2008), in their meta-analysis of collective-action research, identify perceived injustice, efficacy, and social identity as important components of collective action. These findings help explain why political education must engage people's relationships and sense of collective capacity. People need to recognize both what they are confronting and their connection to others confronting it.
Combs et al. (2023) demonstrate the political relevance of designed interpersonal encounters. In a randomized experiment involving 1,419 U.S. partisans, an anonymous cross-party chat intervention reduced polarization relative to a control condition. Such encounters create an opening through which people can reconsider how they understand one another. The organizational task is to carry the work of understanding into shared decisions and sustained action. Critical education should build on the capacity to listen by helping people investigate what institutions they must confront and what they can accomplish together.
Listening is useful within that process, but politeness should not become a substitute for politics. People may understand one another better while continuing to occupy unequal positions. A landlord and tenant can have a respectful exchange without changing who controls housing. Workers may express grievances openly while an employer retains the power to dismiss them. The political question concerns what happens after recognition: whether people can make shared decisions, identify an institution capable of responding, and develop the ability to press a demand. Interpersonal understanding becomes consequential when it helps sustain those capacities.
Ostrom's (1990) research on common-pool resources challenges the presumption that private ownership or centralized state control exhausts the possibilities for collective governance. Her examination of institutional arrangements makes cooperation a problem people can organize through rules, monitoring, and procedures for addressing conflict. This is important for the political imagination: people can build institutions through which they govern shared conditions together. We should cultivate the knowledge and habits required for that work instead of teaching dependence on a rescuing authority as the natural form of politics.
Prefigurative politics connects everyday relationships with structural aspirations. Maeckelbergh (2011) examines organizing practices through which movement participants build democratic relations in the process of contesting existing power. The means of struggle become part of its political content. An organization opposing domination must confront how authority operates within its own meetings, how newcomers gain a voice, and how responsibility is distributed. Collective struggle creates opportunities to practice the relations it seeks to establish more broadly. Those practices give the movement substance in the present.
Local organizing begins a transition by creating capacities that further struggles can use. Consider a tenant association developing shared research, membership, and a procedure for collective decisions. Those capacities support demands for stronger tenant protections and connections with organizations elsewhere. A campus coalition can likewise build relationships across students and workers that outlast the issue bringing them together. The work is cumulative: people learn how to act together, develop institutions that preserve that learning, and connect their local struggle to a wider distribution of power.
Ganz (2024) treats relationship building, public narrative, strategy, action, and organizational structure as interdependent practices of democratic organizing. His account helps explain what is missing when a campaign stops at raising awareness. People need ways to accept responsibility, identify achievable demands, coordinate their work, and learn from the response. In my proposed educational model, a local group becomes politically significant when it develops those practices and connects them to people who can sustain and extend them. Shared understanding begins the work; organization gives it continuity.
Tufekci's (2017) analysis of networked protest is useful because rapid mobilization and durable organizational capacity need not develop together. Visibility and participation can grow faster than the ability to make collective decisions or negotiate changing conditions. Educational spaces should therefore help people practice the less spectacular work of maintaining an organization. Who will document decisions? How will people disagree without forcing every conflict into an immediate split? What will happen when participation falls or a tactic stops working? Those questions belong to political education as much as the analysis of an opponent's power.
I use the idea of pockets of change to describe these sites of sustained practice. Their purpose is to make different relationships possible while developing the ability to act beyond the local setting. A pocket that becomes a refuge for a few insiders can reproduce exclusion. A movement that abandons local relationships for abstract national influence can lose the people who give it substance. The challenge is to connect sites of learning and organization without assuming that either local purity or institutional access supplies a complete strategy.
Reform matters when it changes the conditions of further struggle
The distinction between relief and transformation is a question of power. Reformism turns an adjustment within existing arrangements into the horizon of political possibility. It asks people to accept a manageable concession as an adequate answer to structural harm. A transformative politics evaluates a reform through its place in collective struggle: whether it transfers resources and authority, strengthens organization, or expands the capacity to press further demands. The political failure occurs when a concession becomes a substitute for confronting the relations that made it necessary.
Fraser's (1995) distinction between affirmative and transformative remedies sharpens this analysis. Affirmative remedies address unequal outcomes while preserving the structures that generate them; transformative remedies restructure the underlying framework. The distinction directs attention to who controls institutions and how inequality is reproduced. A government cannot establish that it has overcome a crisis simply by improving a measured outcome. It must answer for the relations through which vulnerability is continually produced and for the power people gain to change those relations.
Wright (2010) examines emancipatory transformation through strategies that operate within and against existing institutions. His framework directs attention to alternatives that can develop social power and extend the conditions of further struggle. Feasibility must be investigated through the capacity people can build, rather than defined by what current elites are willing to grant. A reform belongs to a transformative strategy when it helps organized people contest the next limit imposed upon them. Its meaning emerges through that struggle, not through the state's announcement of a completed solution. Giroux's demand to redirect public resources toward education belongs within this struggle over institutional priorities (Sardoč, 2018, p. 103). We should judge such a victory by the public capacities and democratic control it builds, and use that power to press further demands.
Consider a public subsidy that makes a privately supplied necessity more affordable. The people receiving it may experience meaningful relief. The owner nevertheless retains the power to set prices, extract profit, and determine access. Presenting that subsidy as an escape from neoliberalism converts a limited benefit into political cover for an unchanged relation of domination. The reform must be judged against the power it leaves in place and the collective capacity it creates to challenge that power. Calling the benefit salvation conceals precisely what remains to be fought.
The false promise begins when relief is narrated as deliverance from the system itself. A government announces that a crisis has been solved, a campaign treats its victory as the end of responsibility, or an institution uses a small concession to close further demands. People can then be asked to feel grateful for an improvement while the arrangements producing their vulnerability remain protected. Alami et al. (2024) help explain why increased state activity need not displace commercial imperatives. The number of programs adopted cannot stand in for an account of the power they redistribute.
The standard I defend is a redistribution of the power to determine the conditions of life. We should examine a policy's immediate effects alongside its consequences for ownership, collective organization, and democratic decision-making. Material relief should strengthen the people undertaking the struggle. When an intervention instead closes demands, secures gratitude for existing authorities, and leaves people dependent on those authorities' next act of generosity, its political function is to stabilize the order producing the crisis. That is the function concealed by the narrative of rescue.
Policy debate rehearses the neoliberal promise of rescue
Policy debate gives this political logic an educational form. The round turns accounts of oppression into impacts, gives students the assumed authority to respond, and rewards a performance in which the state resolves the crisis. The people whose suffering supplies the argument remain outside the decision. Their lives furnish the stakes through which competitors establish the importance of winning. The judge delivers a result, and the performance reaches its resolution while the actual conditions described in the impact remain. This is how a simulated rescue becomes an experience of accomplished political responsibility.
Fiat supplies the authority through which this performance proceeds. In policy debate, it allows participants to assume that a proposed action is adopted in order to evaluate whether it should be adopted. Snider (2008, p. 12) distinguishes that convention from the separate burden of proving solvency. My criticism concerns the political standpoint built through this assumption of enactment. Students occupy the position of an authorized state, evaluate the lives and needs of others from that position, and offer a remedy whose legitimacy is measured through competitive comparison.
This starting point reorganizes political struggle as an administrative decision. The advocacy begins with a state already able to act, while the work of building power disappears behind assumed authority. Organizing, resistance, and control over implementation become secondary to the question of which simulated intervention receives the better defense. Students are trained to speak as the institution that will deliver change before confronting how that institution's authority was constituted or whose interests it protects. Fiat makes this borrowed power available as the ordinary standpoint of political judgment.
Mitchell (1998) challenges the assumption that hypothetical preparation develops democratic agency and examines ways to connect argumentation with public advocacy. The problem becomes sharper when preparation repeatedly takes the form of inhabiting state authority. The student rehearses the power to govern while the collective struggle required to contest governance is removed from the center of the exercise. I argue that this separation teaches a neoliberal form of agency: competence in managing an existing order stands in for the capacity to transform its relations of power.
Catastrophic impacts intensify the exchange. The more suffering an argument places at stake, the more political significance its proposed rescue can claim. A small government adjustment is made to carry the weight of saving populations whose vulnerability has been produced through ownership, extraction, and dependence. The gap between the size of the devastation and the narrowness of the remedy gives the state a sweeping moral credit it has not earned. The state is cast as the solution while its relationship to the production of harm recedes from view.
That relation is the link to neoliberalism. State role play grants authority, impact construction supplies suffering, and the promise of rescue turns a limited intervention into a defense of the system's capacity to repair itself. Corporate power survives within the account because the argument has located political agency in the state that manages its consequences. The round teaches participants to experience that management as victory. What appears to be a solution to oppression becomes a way of reproducing the political terms under which oppression continues.
The ballot rewards the conversion of suffering into political credit
The ballot completes the exchange by assigning competitive value to the performance. A successful advocacy earns recognition for the team and symbolic credit for the state represented in its argument. The people described in the impacts become the means through which those rewards are justified. Their suffering establishes the urgency of the decision, but their own political agency is displaced by the student's performance of state competence. The result teaches participants to value a story of governing through the recognition it earns.
I treat the ballot as a metaphorical return on political performance. Participants invest research, time, and accounts of suffering in an advocacy that can be converted into a win, points, or standing. Brown's (2015) account of democratic life translated into economic terms supplies the theoretical basis for this analysis. Competitive valuation reorganizes what political argument is for: the need to understand and change a social relation is subordinated to the ability to make that relation yield a favorable decision. The opponent becomes a barrier to the return, and the people represented become resources within its production.
This valuation also governs whose speech counts. Paroske's (2011) analysis of debate's dominant technical language exposes the unequal access participants have to recognized forms of competence. Fluency in the preferred language becomes an institutional source of power. The ballot rewards arguments within that hierarchy, giving the appearance of neutral judgment to practices that distribute credibility unequally. An educational system organized around winning then has little incentive to value a changed mind, shared understanding, or a refusal to turn another person's suffering into competitive advantage.
A neoliberalism kritik enters the same exchange when it makes the ballot its endpoint. The critical vocabulary becomes another way to earn distinction, and the promise that a vote defeats domination repeats the fantasy of a completed political rescue. The alternative must confront the relationship being practiced in the room. It must change how suffering is represented, how people relate to one another, and what the judgment is asked to reward. Naming neoliberalism carries political force when it interrupts its reproduction through the activity itself.
Critical pedagogy begins by changing the encounter
The relationships in the round are actual political and educational relations. Participants listen, question, dismiss, revise, and assign credibility to one another. These acts determine whether people appear as sources of usable impacts or as participants whose reasoning and experience can transform the inquiry. My alternative begins here because this is where participants already possess the power to act. We can refuse the conversion of oppression into a competitive resource and make the relations producing it the object of collective investigation.
Giroux's defense of the classroom as a democratic public sphere provides a basis for this intervention (Sardoč, 2018, pp. 102–103). I extend that demand to the debate encounter. Participants should have the authority to question the standards governing their exchange, challenge distorted representations of suffering, and revise a claim when collective inquiry exposes its failure. Judges and coaches should make these practices consequential to what they recognize as educational achievement. The alternative acts through the relationships participants can change now and connects that work to the organized struggles through which education can acquire a wider democratic force.
This is also why the interpersonal encounter matters to the alternative. I propose that participants use disagreement to identify a shared question they can continue investigating after the round, then connect that inquiry to people already organizing around it. Research on tuition can become a conversation with a student-worker coalition. Research on housing can become work with a tenant organization. The educational encounter begins a relationship of political responsibility that organized action can carry beyond the competition.
The educational capacities developed through debate make this intervention consequential. Using observational longitudinal data and student fixed-effects methods, Schueler and Larned (2023) estimate positive effects of policy debate on English language arts achievement among Boston public school students, with gains concentrated in analytical skills, and report evidence of improved graduation and postsecondary enrollment outcomes. The political task is to determine what those capacities serve. Research and analysis should equip people to confront domination, rather than make them more effective performers of its management.
Graff (2022) argues that debate techniques can expose conflicting positions and counter groupthink within deliberately designed deliberative education. His account places constraints on competition so that it serves the purposes of deliberation. I take that demand further: disagreement should develop people's ability to investigate power together. A critical pedagogy must make the institutional rules of argument answerable to that purpose. The question is what participants learn to do with evidence, whose claims they take seriously, and how they respond when inquiry threatens the performance needed to win.
Participants should confront the distance between the catastrophe an advocacy invokes and the institutional relation its solution actually changes. An argument that promises rescue must answer for the ownership and power it leaves intact. Cross-examination should expose the mechanism through which the proposed action produces its claimed effects and the political work hidden behind assumed enactment. Calling out this link disrupts the performance by making the state answerable to the relations it has been credited with overcoming. It moves the encounter toward a shared examination of power.
Pruś and Sikora (2025) provide useful practices in their cooperative Cracovian debate format. An interlocutor paraphrases an argument, its proponent confirms or corrects the paraphrase, and participants can clarify, criticize, improve, or withdraw claims. I propose adapting these practices to make the encounter answerable to understanding. Requiring an argument to survive an accurate account of what another person means changes the relationship between disagreement and competitive advantage. Participants gain a way to challenge one another without making distortion the price of success.
Consider a housing advocacy that turns displacement into a catastrophic impact and presents a subsidy as rescue. The critical intervention identifies the ownership relation left intact and challenges the conversion of partial relief into state legitimacy. It demands an account of tenant power, rent extraction, and control over housing. The people in the room must then confront the political relation their argument was performing. That confrontation is an action within the encounter: it interrupts the story of completed rescue and opens the responsibility to investigate and organize beyond it.
Political responsibility includes the risk of failure
The possibility of failure is a reason to develop our praxis, not to abandon it. A campaign may lose, an organization may fracture, and a university may adopt the vocabulary of criticism while protecting its existing priorities. Those conditions are part of the struggle we inherit. Treating them as reasons to wait allows domination to continue without having to defend itself. We must begin building the relationships and institutions through which people can contest that power, and learn through the struggle how to carry the work further.
Young's (2011) social connection model locates responsibility for structural injustice in people's participation in social processes and the collective work needed to transform them. This account grounds a forward-looking political responsibility. Those of us who teach, research, coach, and participate in institutions have obligations to confront the relations through which those institutions reproduce harm. I argue that protecting critical education and building collective organization are ways of meeting that obligation. Responsibility requires us to use the capacities we possess to change conditions that isolated individuals cannot resolve.
The risks of action must be judged against the continuing consequences of inaction. People already live with insecurity, exclusion, and restrictions on their capacity to determine their lives. A demand for certainty treats those harms as the neutral baseline while placing the entire burden of justification on the effort to change them. That is a political choice in favor of the existing distribution of power. We should judge strategies through their capacity to confront that distribution and sustain the people undertaking the struggle.
Collective responsibility requires sharing the burdens of struggle. A tenured professor, a precariously employed instructor, an indebted student, and a community member facing retaliation occupy different positions of security. Those with greater institutional protection should use it to make participation more possible for others. People exposed to a strategy's consequences must have power over its direction. A movement develops democratic agency through that distribution of responsibility, making collective action a practice of the relations it seeks to establish.
Strategic judgment strengthens this obligation. Chenoweth's (2023) review finds that organized armed violence tends to reduce the chances of success of otherwise nonviolent campaigns, while findings concerning unarmed collective violence are less clear. Tactics therefore demand serious evaluation of how they affect a movement's ability to sustain participation and achieve its aims. Political commitment requires using the available evidence to strengthen collective struggle. The obligation to contest injustice includes the work of developing methods through which people can exert power together.
Freire's (1970/2000) account of praxis joins reflection to action. A defeated campaign becomes a demand to examine its strategy, repair relationships, and determine what must change before the next effort. People can preserve the knowledge and capacities developed through struggle even when a particular demand is denied. This continuing work is how political learning becomes collective. Every serious effort to confront domination breaks with the habit of treating its reproduction as inevitable and creates an occasion to develop a different practice.
We therefore have an obligation to begin and to continue. Waiting for guaranteed success grants existing power a security it denies the people living with its consequences. Critical praxis contests that arrangement by creating relationships, making institutions answer for their effects, and building capacities for further action. We owe one another the effort required to develop those capacities and the commitment to carry them beyond the moment of recognition. The possibility of failure does not cancel the responsibility to struggle.
Education must build the power to challenge neoliberalism
The transition begins where people learn together and develop the capacity to act on what they know. It grows as those sites connect to organizations able to sustain demands and contest institutions. Wright (2010) examines strategies for developing emancipatory alternatives, Ostrom (1990) demonstrates the importance of collective institutional design, and Tufekci (2017) exposes the organizational work rapid mobilization can leave undeveloped. Together, these approaches make the practical demand clear: education must help people build the relationships and institutions through which collective power can persist.
Higher education has resources this work needs: research, meeting space, historical knowledge, and sustained opportunities to practice disagreement. Debate develops close reading, comparative analysis, and public argument. We should place these capacities in relationships with communities that help define the questions and govern the use of the resulting knowledge. A research partnership should answer to the people whose conditions it investigates. A classroom should make institutional power intelligible and develop the ability to contest it. The university becomes a site of transformation through the collective work it makes possible.
For those of us who produce and circulate debate evidence, this responsibility reaches the way we read. Cutting an author's account of suffering into a usable impact is already a political act. We must preserve the relations and qualifications that make the account intelligible, investigate whose interests its use serves, and refuse to let competitive utility become the measure of its truth. Evidence should deepen our understanding of the people and institutions at stake. The demand to read responsibly belongs to the larger demand to stop treating oppression as material for our own recognition.
Protecting higher education is part of the struggle to preserve and expand this capacity for collective inquiry. Building local movements gives that inquiry an organized form. The relationships developed in these spaces allow people to connect experiences, confront shared conditions, and create the power to press demands that existing authorities would prefer to contain. Giroux's call for democratic socialism and an alliance of movements gives these pockets of change a common direction (Sardoč, 2018, p. 106). They become beginnings of a transition as participants connect their struggles and build democratic power over the institutions producing their vulnerability.
The neoliberal promise asks us to exchange the demand for transformation for the satisfaction of a managed victory. Debate reproduces that promise when oppression becomes an impact, fiat gives us the state's authority, and a small remedy is made to perform salvation. We must reject that political education. Our obligation is to investigate the relations producing devastation and build the collective power to break them. Critical education gives us a place to begin. Interpersonal relationships make shared struggle possible, and alliances of movements carry that struggle toward democratic control over our common life. We have a responsibility to undertake that work and continue it even when its outcome remains uncertain.