Why Fascists Fear Teachers

Why Fascists Fear Teachers 

by Randi Weingarten

President, AFT

Teachers are under siege not for anything they do wrong, but for what they do right.

An excellent read. (2025)

The title of my new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, is intended as a warning, but it may belie what the book is at its core: a love letter to teachers. I write about teachers’ seemingly small everyday acts, like fostering empathy, confidence, critical thinking and mastery, that cultivate opportunity and humanity in our young people. And I look back at historic acts of heroism, such as the teachers in Norway who were among the first and most resolute to protest the Nazi takeover, even when the Nazis tried to violently force them into submission. When I heard that story many years ago, I would never have believed that echoes of authoritarianism would reverberate in the United States today. Nor could I have imagined that this book would come into the world at a time when heinous acts of political violence are occurring with horrifying frequency, violence that I condemn with every fiber of my being. Yet here we are.

 

Weingarten signing her book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, on Sept. 16 in New York. Photo credit: Mario Jose Ibarra 

I try in this book to answer several questions. Teachers are widely recognized and appreciated for dedicating themselves to helping all children reach their unique potential. So why are there so many attacks on teachers? Why do so many extremist politicians think it’s OK to smear and insult teachers? Why are we seeing the defunding of already strapped schools, the book bans, the censoring of honest history and so many other actions that prevent our children from getting the education they deserve? Why are these actions, which are warning signs of increasing authoritarianism, happening in the United States today?

The answer is that authoritarians fear a well-educated citizenry. They fear what educators do—the teaching of critical thinking, of honest history, of pluralism—because their brand of greed, power and privilege cannot survive in a democracy of diverse, educated citizens. Public education is essential to a free and fair America, and teachers are essential to public education. We’re under siege not for anything we do wrong, but for all the things we do right.

The Founding Fathers believed public education was a bulwark against tyranny. Why Fascists Fear Teachers lays out the plot to undermine public education, which a conservative activist declared outright required his allies to be “ruthless and brutal.”

Extremists are executing that plot with alarming resolve: Starve public schools of the funds they need to succeed, then criticize them for their shortcomings. Erode trust in public schools by stoking fear and division, including attempting to pit parents against teachers. And replace them with homeschooling and private, religious and online schools. All toward their end goal of destroying public education as we know it, atomizing and balkanizing education in America, bullying the most vulnerable among us and leaving the students with the greatest needs in public schools with the most meager resources.

I tell the stories of teachers who have fought for their students and for the promise of public education. I hope educators will see themselves in its pages. And I hope it will help parents, students, policymakers and everyone invested in our nation’s future understand why teachers and public schools are essential to individual opportunity, our collective prosperity and the survival of our democracy.

That feels especially crucial as the country reels from another horrific political assassination. Political violence is never acceptable. Never. As every living former president has said in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, all Americans must condemn violence and de-escalate the tensions roiling the country. In many ways, teachers can serve as the antidote to them, by helping students navigate this trauma and division and by modeling civil discourse.

No one should condone—and certainly no one should celebrate—violence. But in this highly charged moment, many people are paying a high price for exercising constitutionally protected speech, and some have even been accused of hate speech for decrying hate speech. We must recommit as a nation to the right to express ourselves nonviolently without fear and to resolving disagreements peacefully and civilly.

Ninety percent of America’s young people attend public schools, where educators strive to prepare them with the fundamentals for full and productive lives—with the academic foundation they need, of course, as well as the ability to participate in civic life and to work together across differences. Our public schools are America’s great engine of opportunity. They are where teachers dedicate themselves to providing children of every background an education that is safe, welcoming, relevant and engaging. When we strengthen our public schools and support our children’s teachers, we sustain the American dream and democracy itself.

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Why Do Fascists Fear Teachers ?

Why Do Fascists Fear Teachers? :  Randi Weingarten 

Because We Want Kids to Think—and Read—for Themselves

When he was still a student at Morehouse College, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an essay in the student newspaper titled “The Purpose of Education.”⁵ He argued that education has two main purposes: “the one is utility and the other is culture.” Education helps students develop concrete skills and tools and learn how to use them to achieve their goals in life. But that second purpose King wrote about? That purpose is really democracy. “To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.”

“The function of education,” Dr. King went on, “is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.” Critical thinking is vital to accurately understanding societal problems that need to be solved and, together with our civic peers, engaging, analyzing, and innovating as we constantly renew and reinvent our democracy. Critical thinking is the most important muscle in the exercise of democracy. No wonder fascists want to weaken it.

Democracy is being deeply, substantively engaged in the problems and solutions of our society. Which means critical thinking and education are absolutely essential to and intertwined with the practice of democracy. When we think critically, we have our own ideas and opinions, but we simultaneously scrutinize them, weighing other facts and ideas to be as rational as possible. We listen to and really wrestle with ideas and opinions that conflict with our own. And we engage earnestly with people who may think differently from us, exchanging facts and opinions, not taunts and smears.

“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint,” writes historian Heather Cox Richardson in her book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.⁶ Fascist leaders may campaign for our votes, but modern democracies more often fall because of autocratic candidates who work within the system to dismantle it, rather than because of coups or military takeovers. Prominent authoritarianism historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains that fascist and authoritarian leaders want to “damage or destroy democracy.”⁷ Democracy is people power. But fascists want one leader or a small group of elites to have all the power.

The problem for fascists, then, is that a public with strong critical-thinking muscles is more likely to strengthen democracy and resist authoritarianism. Scholars who study democracy worldwide are incredibly clear on this point: “On the whole, higher levels of education are associated with stronger democracies—a country with an educated populace is more likely to become or remain a democracy.”⁸ Looking at data from Latin American elections, researchers Amy Erica Smith and Mollie J. Cohen found that “The more education you have, the less likely you are to vote for an authoritarian.”⁹ In fact, some global scholars have gone as far as to suggest that “education causes democracy.”¹⁰

So is the opposite true? Yes, history has shown us that. For instance, in 2017, the Financial Times found that among Dutch voters, having attained less education was the greatest predictor of support for the country’s anti-immigrant, far-right political party.¹¹ And after winning a primary election during the 2016 election, Donald Trump bragged how well he did with certain demographics, saying, “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”¹² This may or may not have been just another sloppy aside from Trump, but it does reflect a deeper truth. Donald Trump was able to rise to power, yes, because of his keen political instincts and charisma, but also because he routinely says things he thinks voters want to hear, whether he can actually do anything about them or not.

Authoritarians actively attack truth, knowledge, and critical thinking because an uninformed public is easier to control. Degrading public education and critical-thinking skills may only prime more Americans to not recognize disinformation and misinformation and take authoritarian leaders like Trump at their word. Psychologist Bob Altemeyer studied personality traits that make people more receptive to authoritarian leaders. In his 2006 book The Authoritarians, Altemeyer documented his “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” scale, writing:

The authoritarian follower makes himself vulnerable to malevolent manipulation by chucking out critical thinking and prudence as the price for maintaining his beliefs. He’s an “easy mark,” custom-built to be snookered. And the very last thing an authoritarian leader wants is for his followers to start using their heads, to start thinking critically and independently about things.¹³

In other words, those inclined to support authoritarianism exhibit a general avoidance of or allergy to critical thinking. And authoritarians like it that way.

 

 See Also;  Choosing Democracy: A Practical Guide to Multicultural Education.  4th. edition.  201o. Allyn and Bacon.  by Duane Campbell  Used copies on the web very low priced. 

https://www.aft.org/ae/fall2025/weingarten_book?

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More testing from renewed NCLB

AFT’s Weingarten on Secretary Duncan’s ESEA Reauthorization Remarks

In discussing priorities for a revision of No Child Left Behind Secretary of education, Arne Duncan, insisted on  January 5, that the administration would not back away from annual testing for students and performance evaluations of teachers based in part on the results of the tests.

Annual testing has become a point of contention in the often-bitter discussions about how best to improve public education.

Monday, January 12, 2015

WASHINGTON—Statement from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s speech regarding the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

"As I've said before, any law that doesn't address our biggest challenges—funding inequity, segregation, the effects of poverty—will fail to make the sweeping transformation our kids and our schools need. Today, it was promising to hear Secretary Duncan make a call for equity, stressing, as we did through the Equity and Excellence Commission, the importance of early childhood education and engaging curriculum. It was encouraging to hear him laud the hard work of educators, who have had to overcome polarization and deep cuts after a harsh recession. And it was heartening to hear him acknowledge the progress our schools have made. However, the robust progress we saw in the first 40 years after the passage of ESEA has slowed over the last 10 years.

Teachers Union President: Those who blame teachers for everything

By ALAN SCHWARZ. NY. Times.

WASHINGTON — Amid one of the most contentious periods in recent memory for teachers’ unions, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, on Monday called for education reform that emanates from teachers and their communities, rather than from “those who blame teachers for everything.”

“Let’s refuse to be defined by people who are happy to lecture us about the state of public education — but wouldn’t last 10 minutes in a classroom,” Ms. Weingarten told a crowd of about 2,000 here in kicking off the national conference held every two years by the union, which has 1.5 million members.

In the past year, particularly in Wisconsin and New Jersey, governors and some state lawmakers have castigated teachers’ unions and schools’ performance while slashing budgets and pushing newer education strategies like charter schools and more rigorous teacher evaluation.