To be the instrument of God’s peace is not to confine oneself to the field of personal relationships, but to concern oneself also with the problems of human society, hunger, poverty, injustice, cruelty, exploitation, war. - Alan Paton

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children. - Nelson Mandela

Hello Friends,

I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving. Like most people, I’m thankful for my family, my good luck, and more. But I’m also thinking about “the problems of human society.” This week I’ve been thinking a lot about kids because of the Epstein files and all the news surrounding them.

Here’s a great takedown of Megyn Kelly’s argument that 15 year olds aren’t kids.

Did you have a chance to see the video released by Epstein’s victims? A powerful reminder that they were children.

Since it’s a good week to look at some people who spend a great part of their lives caring about all kids, I thought I’d look at Why Fascists Fear Teachers by Randi Weingarten.

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Why Fascists Fear Teachers by Randi Weingarten.

Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy is a compact little book, about 5 x 7 inches, a sort of photograph frame for a snapshot of public education and its role in a democracy (hint: cornerstone). Of the 244 pages, the introduction is 30 pages and the endnotes, with links to back all of the book’s assertions, is 59 pages. Being short, this text focuses on four foundational things that are important to the future of our students and the well-being of our nation—but are antithetical to the fascist anti-government, anti-pluralism, anti-opportunity agenda:

* teachers teach critical thinking;

* teachers foster safe and welcoming communities;

* teachers create opportunity;

* and teachers build strong unions.

Fascism here has a broad definition and includes the oligarchies and authoritarianism we are currently witnessing. Weingarten quotes Jason Stanley‘s definition of fascism: “ultranationalism of some variety, ethnic, religion, cultural, with a nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf.” She also quotes Timothy Snyder explaining that it’s hard to create an academic definition of fascism because its point is to reject reason in favor of will.

I wish the title of Why Fascists Fear Teachers had been “Why Fascists Hate Teachers” because the word ‘fear’ implies that educators have power over fascism. That remains to be seen. What we do know is that the far-right culture wars cost public schools nationwide more than $3 billion in the 2023-2024 school year alone.

I picked up Why Fascists thinking it was a book for teachers (that’s me), but it’s not. Generally speaking, teachers already know what the book asserts. However, they might want to read the section on unions, which reminds us of how their existence is beneficial for all but the elite classes.

Since this is a short book, both positive and didactic, a general primer, I’ll give you a quick look at its ideas. I thought it’d also be fun to share some quotes.

Critical thinking

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” —John Adams

A free society depends on free minds. FDR: “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.” (35)

Weingarten discusses how authoritarian regimes co-opt or circumvent norms and institutions that are meant to support basic liberties including the opportunities to think and choose for oneself. I don’t think it was hard for her to find examples, some of them outrageous enough that we couldn’t have imagined them even a decade ago. Think of Oklahoma’s state superintendent trying to force all OK schools to teach the Bible—the Trump Bible, which he intended to buy with taxpayer money. Of course, historical and current-day examples of book banning fit nicely into this chapter. She then moves on to what is actually taught in public schools and defends that against the ‘woke agenda’ charge.

Safe and welcoming communities

“The good Education of Youth has been esteemed by wise Men in all Ages, as the surest Foundation of the Happiness, both of private Families, and of Commonwealths.” —Benjamin Franklin

There’s an interesting story here about President LB Johnson teaching in a segregated Mexican school when he was a young man earning his college tuition. It likely influenced his later support of civil rights and voting rights.

It goes without saying that fascists don’t want a safe and welcoming community for all. Examples of how schools provide services for all kids abound; dental support including teeth cleaning for students in an impoverished community is a good example of how educators reach out to support the whole student (the community schools model). Weingarten also discusses the more obvious safety issues that educators are worried about in all schools, particularly: guns and school shootings, and the harms of social media and other new technologies, including loneliness.

She points out that oligarchs who make money on algorithms that harm young people are not friends of public education. We should not be handing over government leadership roles to them (Elon Musk and DOGE) or even giving them the best seats in the house for a presidential inauguration.

“To be clear, fascists and autocrats and far right extremists don’t want to help all students, nor do they want to strengthen public schools. They don’t want to teach students about the painful parts of American history, and they don’t want to level the playing field for children living in abject poverty. Because their goal is to exploit problems, not solve them. They want to divide Americans, otherizing those who are different while attacking pluralism and diversity, inclusion, and equity as the problem. These extremists try to pit us against each other and distract us so they can rig the system for themselves. When the far right gets enough people to believe that diversity is a threat and opportunity is a zero-sum game, they use the anger and resentment they foment to defund and destabilize public education.” (7-8)

Creating Opportunities

“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. … They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” —Thomas Jefferson

This chapter dives into the connection between attacks on public education and the history of segregation in the U.S. School vouchers began as a way to continue segregating schools and have been proven to do little more than deliver taxpayer money to families who already had their kids in private schools and, thus, could afford to do so without that transference of funds away from public schools. Meanwhile, public schools are depleted of funds. “Oligarchs and extremists do not believe in education for all. In fact, … many fight against the fundamental idea of education for all, privatizing public resources, while questioning whether we should even have public schools.” (106) Examples of this include the conservative economist Milton Friedman, who, in the year after Brown v. the Board of Education, wrote a manifesto proposing school vouchers as a strategy for privatizing education. Friedman later supported fascists such as Chile’s authoritarian military dictator Augusto Pinochet. He helped Pinochet institute universal school vouchers in Chile, which research showed were largely found “‘to have exacerbated inequality, reduced public school enrollment, and [had] minimal to no impact on student achievement.’” (108) The Heritage Foundation (which produced the Project 2025 playbook) calls for enacting universal school vouchers nationwide.

Rather than support vouchers, public schools have moved toward the inclusion of charter schools. While Weingarten isn’t opposed to charter schools as a concept, she objects to the lack of oversight and the waste of public funds such a lack creates.

“I don’t remotely think the idea of charter schools is inherently bad. But what I do believe is that the private market model is not inherently better when it comes to education. We’ve known for years that when you control for differences in social economic status, private schools aren’t any better at educating children than public schools. And a 2016 internal audit by the federal Department of Education at the end of the Obama administration—which aggressively pushed an expansion of charter schools in the neoliberal model—found that the lack of accountability posed a serious ‘risk of waste, fraud, and abuse.’” (127)

The state of Pennsylvania provides a good example for showing the disaster created from charter schools having no oversight. They’ve taken $1 billion a year from the public schools, but their public schools are severely underfunded. Charter schools are running a surplus, which is tantamount to profit. In the case of cyber charter schools, the budgets have grown by 92,000%. What do they spend it on? “Well, according to one investigative report, Pennsylvania cyber charter schools spent $21 million in one school year alone on advertising and gift cards. Once cyber school’s company accumulated $88 million in real estate purchased with taxpayer money, including several parking lots and an old Macy’s that doesn’t seem remotely related to the business of trying to teach children online.” (127-8)

What does all this teach us? “We can’t put millionaires and billionaires in charge of designing an education system that works for all. They’ll only keep systems that work for themselves, and then, as soon as they can, replace us all with as much artificial intelligence as they can get away with.” (129)

As my favorite educator, Diane Ravitch states:

“Like police and fire protection, public parks, public highways, and clean air and water, public schools are public goods, funded by and belonging to the public.” (105)

Unions

This chapter is a discussion of how unions and collective bargaining work, along with a brief history which includes attacks on labor unions as a hallmark of fascism. Details include Mussolini, Hitler, and Pinochet dissolving trade unions and imprisoning their leaders. Necessary to democracy is ‘regular people having agency.’ Fascists remove agency and install a single authoritarian leader. While unions work to make life better for all working people, fascists rely on “mobilizing resentment.” If people are not feeling resentment, that’s hard to do. What provides a fertile landscape for fascism is extreme economic inequality. Then the fascists can scapegoat immigrants and minorities.

“Look, no institution is perfect.… But while schools and unions face almost constant scrutiny, wealthy, powerful special interests are often let completely off the hook. For instance, when some of the largest private banks in America made massive mistakes, leading to the 2008 financial crisis, they weren’t held accountable. They were bailed out and propped up. So bear in mind that when friends of these bankers and other billionaire special interests attack unions, they don’t really believe in ‘accountability’ in any real sense. They just want to destroy the ability of unions to be a check on their unfettered power.” (144)

Side note: In the first paragraph of Why Fascists Fear Teachers, Weingarten tells the story of teachers and students in Norway wearing paper clips as a secret signal/reminder to remain united against the Nazis during WWII, “bound together like a stack of paper.” E. Jean Carroll has promoted the idea of wearing paper clips now as a signal of opposition to the authoritarianism rising in the U.S. This reminded me: I have some wacky paper clips that were gifted to me, each with an image pertaining to writing. I thought it would be fun to alternate wearing them (they are fairly large for and heavy for paper clips), but it’s hard to tell they are paper clips, so it probably wouldn’t announce that ‘secret signal.’

American History

Speaking of history, are you watching The American Revolution, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt? It began last Sunday on PBS. “This six-part documentary explores America’s founding through the lives of men and women from all walks of life, the famous and the forgotten. … [H]istorian Geoffrey C. Ward and Burns released a large, lavishly illustrated companion book that expands on the series.” I’ve enjoyed the first 4 episodes.

And here’s something of interest from writers and poets:

Poets are now cybersecurity threats: Researchers used ‘adversarial poetry’ to trick AI into ignoring its safety guard rails and it worked 62% of the time.

Thanks for reading! I hope you have much to be thankful for!

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