Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy - Hardcover

Weingarten, Randi

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798217045419

Verlag: Thesis, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A rousing defense of public education as the cornerstone of American democracy, by the woman attacked by the far right as “the most dangerous person in the world”

Attacks on schools and teachers have long been a hallmark of fascist regimes: Throughout history, as many dictators rose to power they began banning books and controlling curriculum. Fascists fear teachers because teachers foster an educated and empowered population that can see past propaganda and scare tactics. Fascists fear teachers because they teach young people how to think for themselves.

As the head of one of the largest teachers’ unions in America, Randi Weingarten is among the last lines of defense for American public education. For decades, she has sounded the alarm that attacks on teachers are part of a larger, darker agenda—to undermine democracy, opportunity, and public education as we know it. After the Trump administration declared its intention to dismantle the Department of Education, that alarm became undeniable. This book tells the story of what teachers do and why those who are afraid of freedom and opportunity try to stop them. It explains why all Americans should care about attacks on schools and teachers—whether they have school-aged children or not. In the past as today, the fate of the United States is inexorably intertwined with the fate of public education.

Drawing on history, stories from teachers on the front lines, and decades of experience with America’s public schools, Weingarten argues that teaching students to think critically is the key to defeating would-be dictators. She encourages teachers to continue focusing on their vital mission to help young people thrive—creating opportunity in safe and welcoming classrooms, promoting tolerance, and teaching problem solving, critical thinking, and healthy debate. She cautions against censorship and complacency, looking to the past to warn us all about what can happen if we devalue teachers and public schools.

A manifesto for our time, Why Fascists Fear Teachers is necessary reading for every American worried about the future of our democracy.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Since 2008, Randi Weingarten has served as the elected president of the AFT, a union of 1.8 million educators, health care professionals, and public-service workers. For ten years prior, she headed the United Federation of Teachers, the union representing educators in New York City’s public schools, and before that taught social studies at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, New York. She has degrees from the Cardozo School of Law and the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

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1

Teachers Teach Critical Thinking

In October 2022, about a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, I led a small delegation of educators and health professionals to visit the Ukrainian city of Lviv. We met with teachers and their union to find out what the international community could do to help them and their students recover.

My wife, Sharon, is a rabbi and joined me because she deeply understands ministry amid trauma, across generations and contexts. And on our way to Ukraine, entering through Poland, we made a point to stop at the Janusz Korczak Monument in Warsaw.

Henryk Goldszmit was born to a Polish Jewish family, trained as a pediatrician, but reached acclaim as a children's book author under his pen name Janusz Korczak. But Korczak wanted to do even more to help children. So he became a teacher.

In 1912, Korczak took a position as the director of an orphanage for Jewish children, which he organized as a tiny democracy. The students had a newspaper, a parliament, and even a court where they would hear and resolve grievances. Korczak thought it was important for his students to think critically and freely, especially as the space for free thinking was closing up all around them. He taught them the value of democracy, even as the world around them was sliding into autocracy. The memorial Sharon and I visited sits on the site of the former orphanage. It shows Korczak with a thoughtful gaze, his arms gently resting around a gaggle of children, one of whom stares up at him with the same look of reverence that I feel.

Nazis had already gone after Jewish children attending German schools. In 1938, Jewish students were completely banned from them. In 1940, when the Nazis created the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, Korczak's orphanage was forced to move there and Korczak, of course, went with his children. As fascism was closing in all around him, he kept teaching his students how to free their minds. But then, in August 1942, the Nazi genocide came for Korczak's Jewish students. Nazis came to round up the 190 or so orphans under Korczak's charge. Korczak dressed the kids up and each of them carried a favorite toy or game. Korczak walked with his students to help them keep calm. And though Korczak himself was offered sanctuary, in part because of his fame, he refused. He insisted on staying with his students. Korczak walked with his young students, and together they boarded the train that would ultimately take them to concentration camps. They were never heard from again.

When Sharon and I walked along those same train tracks, we reflected on Korczak's devotion as a teacher-literally guiding his students in every way, shepherding them until the very end. And we reflected on his simple act of rebellion-daring to teach children to think for themselves and be themselves amid encroaching autocracy. The goal of education in the Third Reich and fascism in general is indoctrination of youth-trying to compel young people to embrace only certain ideas and certain people. Critical thinking is the antidote. Critical thinking means you form your own ideas and your own opinions about the world, based on your own knowledge and analysis, not blind loyalty or fear. Fascists, autocrats, and other extremists are afraid of critical thinking and they fear teachers because teachers teach critical thinking that is foundational to a free, knowledge-based society. The ability to reason through complex problems, to separate fact from fiction and information from disinformation, to apply reasoning and form one's own opinions is central to knowledge and essential to the very democracy that fascists and autocrats want to destroy. Fascist attacks on critical thinking are part of a concerted strategy. As philosopher Umberto Eco observed about the same era of fascism in Italy, "All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning."

In 1924, Korczak wrote that students "should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be-the unknown person inside each of them is our hope for the future." That hope-that boundless possibility of self-actualization in every young person-is disruptive to fascism and essential to democracy. Korczak fought for that hope, that self-actualization, with every fiber of his being. That's what great teachers do-no matter what. And critical thinking has been central to public education in the United States since our nation's founding. Because our Founding Fathers understood what Korczak knew-that a free society depends on free minds.

The Founders' Case for Public Education

The founding of our nation and the creation of public education have always been intertwined. James Madison, who helped draft the Constitution and served as the fourth president of the United States, called education "the only Guardian of true liberty." Madison once wrote, "The American people owe it to themselves, and to the cause of free Government, to prove by their establishments for the advancement and diffusion of Knowledge . . . What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty & Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?"

Indeed, there were early versions of public schools in America even before the United States became a nation. The Boston Latin School was founded in 1635, well before the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was funded by public money, though it was only open to male students (women weren't admitted until 337 years later, in 1972). Some of Boston Latin School's early students would go on to help forge our new nation-students including John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Franklin.

It was Horace Mann who really expanded public education in the United States. In the mid-1800s, as secretary of the Board of Education in Massachusetts, Mann started a movement for "common schools." They were called common schools not because they were plain-though they definitely were by today's standards-but common in the sense of "common good." "Education," argued Mann, "beyond all other divides of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men-the balance wheel of the social machinery."

As education professor Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire write, "Universal, taxpayer-supported schooling was initially a civic project. The aim was to ensure the kinds of basic competencies for all young people that had for so long been the exclusive preserve of the middle and upper classes." They note that historian David Labaree calls this the "democratic equality" objective of the common schools movement.

A century after Horace Mann, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would add, "Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education." And decades later, President John F. Kennedy would say, "Only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all." The idea that democracy and public education are inextricably linked is a constant theme of the American experiment. As the eminent education historian Diane Ravitch points out, "Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time." Critical thinking skills among the citizenry are essential to fulfilling the promise of democracy.

The idea of critical thinking as central to enlightenment and individual liberty dates back well before the founding of the United States of America. In Ancient Greece, Plutarch advanced both modern philosophy and education by arguing that true wisdom involves critical thinking and questioning common knowledge rather than just accepting it. He said,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Thesis
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798217045419
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 244
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar