With nearly every day presenting more evidence of America’ s eroding democracy, it’ s understandable to wonder whether a countervailing force will come forward to ensure— to paraphrase Lincoln— that the government of, by, and for the people will endure.
Mass protests with catchy themes like“ Hands Off” and“ No Kings” seem to offer more symbolism than substance. Court cases often fail to uphold key democratic provisions such as voting rights and press freedoms. The political party representing opposition to the current“ antidemocratic” presidential regime is more unpopular than ever. Prominent political experts caution that campaigning to protect and uphold democracy isn’ t a winning strategy. And leading historians warn that the country is sliding toward fascism.
But a new book suggests that a powerful force for democracy and against fascism is indeed at work every day, despite all that’ s being done to undermine it. And it’ s not in the halls of Congress. It’ s in public school classrooms.
In her new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy, president of the American Federation of Teachers( AFT) Randi Weingarten, makes the case that democracy doesn’ t only happen when political candidates vie for office, citizens post their opinions on editorial pages and social media, and voters show up at the ballot box. Democracy is also at work, she explains, when public school teachers engage in the seemingly mundane tasks of educating students.
Engaging in this work, Weingarten contends, has always made teachers a target for dictators— would-be and otherwise— who seek to undermine democracy and impose autocratic rule. Drawing from history, from stories of frontline teachers, and from her experiences as a former teacher— a champion for educators and a lightning rod for criticism from politicians in both political parties— Weingarten argues that public schools and teachers are“ inextricably linked” with protecting democracy and ensuring its enduring presence in the nation’ s politics and governance.
Weingarten’ s case comes across most vividly in her examples of teachers who resisted fascist dictators in 20th-century Germany. In 1940, when Adolf Hitler’ s Nazi army invaded Norway, teachers were among the frontline resistors to the takeover, she recounts. They refused to join a Nazi imposed teacher corps, even when German soldiers came into their schools and beat them. And when the Nazis eventually closed schools, teachers kept teaching students in secrecy.
In Poland, when Nazi forces shut down an orphanage for Jewish children run by Henryk Goldszmit, a Polish Jew who became a teacher and prominent author of children’ s books under the pen name of Janusz Korczak, Goldszmit continued to teach his students, staying with them even when they boarded trains to the concentration camp, after which he and his students were never heard from again.
Another educator in the Nazi resistance was Lucie Aubrac, a French teacher who helped publish an underground newspaper and delivered communications and packages for the French Resistance.
Weingarten also tells of dedicated teachers in the U. S. during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation who protested, with their students, the appalling conditions in schools Black children attended. Their
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