Independent journalist Jeff Bryant takes a look at a new book from American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
[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 advocacy on behalf of their students helped bring about the legal actions that would eventually lead to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling that made racially segregated schools illegal.