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?

The Computer Canard and Testing in California Schools

Many California school districts are rushing to spend money to add computers and internet access to schools in order to prepare students to take on-line computer assessments next year.

According to Diane Lambert in the Sacramento Bee, of Feb.19,  “Sacramento-area school districts have spent millions of dollars in the past two years upgrading their broadband connections and buying computers and other technology so thousands of students can simultaneously take the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, which will replace the former pencil-and-paper STAR test.

The computerized tests will measure how well students grasp the new Common Core standards, a set of national guidelines that California and 44 other states have embraced as the next big shift in teaching. “ Common Core  claims to stress  critical thinking, problem solving and the use of technology.”

http://www.sacbee.com/2014/02/19/6169465/new-computer-testing-boosts-technology.html
See update: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/02/22/6181489/public-eye-whats-the-best-equipment.html

Lets get real. Computers can and should be an important part of student learning, particularly above about grade 3.  But, buying massive amounts of technology in order to facilitate test taking- well that is another matter. The K-12 education software market in the U.S. reached 7.97 billion in 2011/2012.

Texas GOP continues war on thinking

Commentary: Texas GOP wages war on thinking

By Leonard Pitts Jr. | McClatchy Newspapers

Some recent headlines from the alternate universe of modern conservatism:

Rush Limbaugh claims the bad guy in the new Batman movie was named Bane to remind voters of Mitt Romney's controversial tenure at Bain Capital.

Michelle Bachmann, citing zero credible evidence, accuses a Muslim-American aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio's crack investigators announce that President Obama's long-form birth certificate is a fake.

In other words, it's just an average week down there in Crazy Town. And that lends a certain context to a tidbit brought to national attention last week by Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report." Meaning a plank from the 2012 platform of the Republican Party of Texas which, astonishingly enough, reads as follows: "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

Holy wow. That is, without a doubt, the most frightening sentence this side of a Stephen King novel.

The Texas GOP has set itself explicitly against teaching children to be critical thinkers. Never mind the creeping stupidization of this country, the growing dumbification of our children, our mounting rejection of, even contempt for, objective fact. Never mind educators who lament the inability of American children to think, to weigh conflicting paradigms, analyze competing arguments, to reason, ruminate, question and reach a thoughtful conclusion. Never mind that this promises the loss of our ability to compete in an ever more complex and technology-driven world.

More on Texas Republicans seek to ban critical thinking

Criminalizing Thinking: Dumb, Ignorant, Mean or Greedy ?

by Rodolfo F. Acuña

I am having trouble getting into this essay on the war on critical thinking. I cannot figure out whether it is dumb or ignorant.  My mother would say that the people conducting the war are malditos, mean.  The reality is that the criminalization of rational thought goes beyond being dumb, ignorant or just plain mean.   

Because the consequences are so calculated and far reaching, it is important to break it down so everyone can understand it and where we are headed.

Fascism did not start on February 27, 1933 with the burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin; it did not begin with the building of concentration camps after the fire. It was all planned and a strategy of division, doubt, and fear simply bore fruit at this point.

Hitler summed up his strategy; he sowed the seeds of “mental confusion, contradiction of feelings, indecision, [and] panic.”

Were the German people dumb, ignorant or just plain malditos?  Some were all of the above.

Texas Republicans oppose critical thinking skills

Texas GOP: No More Critical Thinking in Schools

By Liana Heitin on June 28, 2012 5:45 PM

Teachers, you may want to be sitting down for this one.

The 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform, adopted June 9 at the state convention in Forth Worth, seems to take a stand against, well, the teaching of critical thinking skills. Read it for yourself:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

As a top commenter on a Reddit thread wrote about the language, "I was absolutely sure this had to be an elaborate fake ... ." It's not.

We at Teacher think this may be a kind of first. While the push for accountability via standardized testing—which the current Democratic administration has stood behind—has frequently been characterized as potentially undermining instruction in critical thinking, blatant opposition to teaching students to think deeply has not often (ever?) been a part of the policy conversation.