The crisis of
education in the United States presents not only a danger
to American democracy, but also advances the ideological
and structural foundations for the emergence of a fascist
state. The slide towards lawlessness and authoritarianism
is now aided and abetted by educational policies that are
repressive and dystopian, wedded to social control and the
death of the social imagination. An unimagined catastrophe
now characterizes how American education is being shaped
by far-right Republican Party politicians. Nowhere is this
more evident than in the policies of Republican Governor
Ron DeSantis, who is on the forefront of transforming American
education into a feral propaganda tool for producing and
legitimating what is euphemistically called “patriotic
education.” Coercion, conformity, and toxic forms
of religious, political, and economic fundamentalisms now
threaten to destroy education as a democratic public sphere,
however weak it may be. Institutions of learning at all
levels in the red states are becoming laboratories for what
I term the Nazification of American education, replicating
pedagogies of repression that were at work in Germany in
the 1930s.
The mean-spirited,
far-right DeSantis and his Republican allies have inverted
an insight taken from the renowned, late educator John Dewey
who recognized that politics required informed judgments,
public dialogue, dissent, critical exchange, judicious discrimination,
and the ability to discern the truth from lies. Instead
of embracing these democratic elements of education as central
to creating citizens with an open mind and with a willingness
to engage in a culture of questioning in order to expand
and deepen the conditions necessary for a flourishing democracy,
DeSantis and the GOP are doing everything they can to remove
such practices both from schools and other cultural apparatuses
that function as teaching machines. Under such circumstances,
DeSantis and the GOP are producing what Dewey claimed amounted
to the “eclipse of the public,” which he considered
the most serious threat to the fate of democracy. DeSantis
has put into place a range of reactionary educational policies.
These include banning books and critical race theory, requiring
educators sign loyalty oaths, and forcing them to post their
syllabus’s online. He has also instituted legislation
that restrict tenure and allows students to film faculty
classes without consent, and much more.
Not only are
these laws aimed at minorities of class and color, but this
GOP attack on education is part of a larger war on the very
ability to think, question, and engage in politics from
the vantage point of being critical, informed, and willing
to hold power accountable. More generally, it is part of
a concerted effort not only to destroy public education,
but the very foundations of political agency. DeSantis poses
a dangerous threat to higher education, which he would like
to turn into “a dead zone for killing the social imagination,
a place where ideas that don’t have practical results
go to die and where faculty and students are punished through
the threat of force or harsh disciplinary measures for speaking
out, engaging in dissent and holding power accountable.”
In this case, the attempt to undermine schooling as a public
good and democratic public sphere is accompanied by a systemic
attempt to destroy the capacity for critical thinking, compassion
for others, critical literacy, moral witnessing, support
for the social compact, and the civic imagination. DeSantis
justifies these acts of repression by claiming that “Florida
schools have become socialism factories” and that
students at all levels of education should not be subjected
to classroom material that would make them uncomfortable.
This is code for a pedagogy of repression that revels in
deception, kills the social imagination, depoliticizes students,
and transforms schools into militarized punishing machines,
propaganda factories, and components of the security-surveillance
state. In many ways, the GOP and DeSantis approach to education
is not unlike what Putin is doing in Russia. As a senior
Kremlin bureaucrat, Sergei Novikov, recently put it, Putin’s
goal is “impart state ideology to schoolchildren….We
need to know how to infect them with our ideology. Our ideological
work is aimed at changing consciousness.” Indeed!
Max Boot, writing in The Washington Post, argues that DeSantis’
educational policies represent “one of the most alarming
assaults on free speech and academic freedom [and reveal]
a troubling pattern of authoritarianism and vindictiveness
that would be extremely dangerous in the Oval Office.”
DeSantis’s
policies have been particularly cruel and repressive with
respect to punishing youth who are marginalized by way of
their race, religion, and sexual orientation. He has expanded
his attack on Black people by pushing policies that translate
“hate speech into proposed laws that would make societal
pariahs out of transgender kids” and has made homophobia
a driving force of his politics. He shares the disgraced
legacy of Trump and other far-right Republican politicians
who believe that the threat of violence, if not its actual
use, is not only the best way to resolve issues in the name
of political opportunism, but also amounts to a display
of patriotism. DeSantis’ policies reek of fear, intimidation,
and the threat of violence against his critics, especially
those educators, teachers, parents, youth, and community
groups that reject his attacks on public education and his
anti-gay legislation. His policies are also in line with
the violence expressed by Christian fascists such as Joe
Ottman, founder of Faith, Education, and Commerce United,
who as Paul Rosenberg remarked “stated on his podcast,
Conservative Daily, that teachers are ‘recruiting
kids to be gay’ and that LGBTQ teachers should be
‘dragged behind a car until their limbs fall off.’”There
is little doubt that such measures echo the infamous anti-communist
hysteria reminiscent of the dark days of McCarthyite period
in the 1950s when thousands of people were banned from their
jobs for holding left wing views, and in some cases jailed.
DeSantis’ model of politics and reactionary education
are closely related to the attacks on education and history
that took place in Nazi Germany, a point that is almost
completely missed in the mainstream and progressive press
when analyzing DeSantis’s war on education.
EDUCATION IN
NAZI GERMANY
Education under
the Third Reich offers significant insights into how repressive
forms of pedagogy become central to shaping the identities,
values, and worldviews of young people. Nazi educational
policies also made visible how in the final analysis education
is always political in that it is a struggle over agency,
ideology, knowledge, power, and the future. For Hitler,
mattes of indoctrination, education, and the shaping of
the collective consciousness of young people was an integral
element of Nazi rule and politics. In Mein Kampf,
Hitler stated that “Whoever has the youth has the
future.” According to Lina Buffington and her co-authors,
he viewed this battle to indoctrinate youth as part of a
wider strategy of Nazi control over education. As Hitler
wrote in Mein Kampf, Germany needs an “educational
regime [where] young people will learn nothing else but
how to think German and act German . . . And they will never
be free again, not in their whole lives.” Under this
regime, education was reduced to a massive propaganda machine
whose purpose was to indoctrinate young people with “robot-like
obedience to Nazi ideologies,” while privileging physical
strength, racial instruction, and nationalist fanaticism.
At the same time, the most valued form of knowledge under
the Nazi educational system emphasized a pedagogy of racial
purity.
Race consciousness
was a crucial pedagogical goal which was used to both unify
young people and elicit political loyalty based on national
honor and a “budding nationalistic fanaticism.”
To achieve this goal and reduce resistance to fascist ideology,
history books were censored, banned, destroyed, and rewritten
to align with Nazi ideology. Any knowledge or information
deemed dangerous was not only eliminated from books and
the curricula, but also purged “from libraries and
bookstores.”
Nazi education
was designed to mold children rather than educate them.
Races deemed “inferior” and “less worthy”
were banned from the schools while any positive reference
to them and their history was expunged from history books
and other curricula materials. The Nazi educational system
was deeply anti-intellectual and created modes of pedagogy
that undermined the ability of students to think for themselves.
As stressed by the writers of The Holocaust Explained, the
Nazis “aimed to de-intellectualize education: they
did not want education to provoke people to ask questions
or think for themselves. They believed this approach would
instill obedience and belief in the Nazi worldview, creating
the ideal future generation.” Turning Nazi schools
into propaganda factories functioned through a massive pedagogical
machinery of conformity, censorship, repression, and indoctrination.
The attack on teachers also took place through Nazi efforts
to encourage students and loyal faculty to spy on those
considered politically unreliable. Even worse, teachers
who did not support either Nazi ideology or the restructuring
of education were dismissed along with Jewish educators
who were banned from teaching in the Nazi educational system.
What critics
often fail to acknowledge is that the open glorification
of “Aryan” races in Nazi Germany has its counterparts
in a range of policies now pushed by Republican politicians
such as DeSantis. This is not only visible in white replacement
theory and the rise of white supremacy in the United States,
but also in voter suppression laws, the elimination of the
history of oppressed groups from school curricula, the banning
of books, and the assault on educators who do not agree
with the transformation of American education into right-wing
propaganda factories. Not unlike what we have seen in the
United States, Nazi education exhibited a contempt for critical
thought, open dialogue, provocative books, intellectual
ability, and those youth considered unworthy. The comparisons
are particularly evident under the leadership of DeSantis
with his deeply anti-intellectual view of schooling, whitewashing
of history, outlawing books, supporting “patriotic
education,” passing anti-LGBTQ+ bills and using perpetual
fear and intimidation directed at teachers, parents, and
youth of color. A particularly egregious echo of the fascist
past can be seen in the current attack on librarians. Increasingly,
they are being harassed, threatened, and called pedophiles
by far-right extremists because they have books on their
library shelves that deal with LGBTQ rights and racial equality.
Some fascist book censors have gone as far as claiming that
librarians who refuse to remove banned books are “grooming”
children to be sexually exploited and have attempted to
“seek criminal charges against” them.
The model of
Nazi Germany’s educational system has a great deal
to teach us about the ideologies that produced a society
wedded to the related doctrines of racial purity, the banning
of books, the suppression of historical memory, ultra-nationalism,
and the cult of the strongman. Under DeSantis, white supremacy,
systemic racism, and the indoctrination of youth have the
official power of the state on their side. DeSantis’
attacks on youth considered unworthy (LGBTQ youth), his
embrace of lower academic standards, subjecting faculty
to political litmus tests through “viewpoint diversity
surveys” aimed to “gather evidence” on
non-compliant faculty, censoring books that do not follow
his ideological proclivities, racializing knowledge, supporting
textbooks as crucial tools for spreading propaganda to students,
and controlling teacher’s classroom actions are closely
related to the Nazi playbook for making education a tool
for indoctrination and control.
The horrors
of authoritarianism are back supported by white supremacists
such as DeSantis. The long simmering mobilizing passions
of fascism are evident not only in a range of reactionary
GOP policies that extend from undoing women’s reproductive
rights and the right to vote, but also in a more insidious
and less acknowledged attack on America’s educational
institutions. These attacks amount to a counter-revolution
against essential public institutions, critical agency,
informed consciousness, engaged citizenship, and the capacity
of individuals and a public to govern themselves. At its
core, it is an attack on both the promise of democracy and
the social imagination.
Critical education
is the scourge of white supremacists, because it offers
a counterpoint to right-wing educational practices that
seduce people into inhabiting the ecospheres of hate, bigotry,
and racism. Such anti-racist pedagogies are especially important
because of the threat posed by white supremacists to white
youths, who are especially vulnerable given how many of
them are alienated and isolated, lacking a sense of purpose
and excluded, while in need of some sense of community.
Racism is learned and white supremacists have enlisted several
educational tools, particularly online video games, chat
groups, Tik Tok, and other social platforms, to promote
and enlist white youths. Ibram X Kendi rightly raises the
question of how “white children are being indoctrinated
with white supremacist views, what causes them to hate,
and how they have become the prime target of white supremacists.”
He points to a 2021 Anti-Defamation League report which
states: “An estimated 2.3 million teens each year
are exposed to white-supremacist ideology in chats for multiplayer
games [and] that 17 percent of 13-to-17-year-olds …
encounter white-supremacist views on social media.”
In response to this fascist threat, there is a need to acknowledge
the political importance of anti-racist education in teaching
young people how to recognize the threats posed by white
supremacy, how to resist racism in all of its forms, how
to turn away from hate, and how to discern truth from falsehoods
and right from wrong. In reference to the ongoing threat
of white supremacy to white kids, with its broad cultural
reach and presence in the social media, Kendi writes of
the importance of anti-racist pedagogy. He writes:
Republicans
such as DeSantis reproduce and accelerate the adoption of
white supremacist views among many vulnerable white youths.
They do this by censoring critical ideas, eviscerating history
of its genocidal and racist past, banning books, imposing
degrading constraints on teachers, and in doing so undermining
the critical capacities crucial to teaching about systemic
racism and its Jim Crow history. DeSantis’ attack
on teaching history in the schools draws much of its energy
from nostalgic rendering of the past when whites could be
proud of a society in which whiteness was an unapologetic
mark of privilege, inequality, and state violence. For DeSantis
and his Republican Party allies that past is now threatened
by people of colour, justifying a “political programme
that indicts the present as a crime against the past.”
His attacks on public and higher education constitutes a
form of apartheid pedagogy.
DeSantis’s
fascistic educational policies thrive on a deadly mix of
ignorance and racial hatred. The consequences, while indirect,
are deadly, as we have witnessed from a number of mass shootings,
including the massacre of 10 Black shoppers in a Tops grocery
store in Buffalo by a young hate-filled racist and self-proclaimed
fascist. As historical consciousness and critical knowledge
and skills disappear in schools under DeSantis’ policies,
young people are not merely misinformed, they are powerless
to recognize in the realm of popular culture how supremacists
are using history for their own toxic purposes. For instance,
Jeffrey St. Clair writes about how far right groups such
as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have appropriated
the image of the late Chilian fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet,
adorning his image on “shirts, stickers, and flags.”
In the educational world being produced by DeSantis and
his Republican Party zombies, Pinochet would be erased from
history, leaving young people ignorant of how history can
be used for fascist goals. In this instance, educational
repression is directly connected to the violence of organized
forgetting.
Let’s
be clear about what is at stake in the fascistic and racist
forms of education currently in place in over 36 states
by the Republican Party.[26] This is an attack on the very
possibility of thinking critically along with the pedagogies
and institutions that support the capacity for analytical
thought and informed judgment as a foundation for creating
informed individuals. It also constitutes a full-fledged
attack not just on critical race theory but also critical
pedagogy in general. Of course, critical pedagogy is not
just about anti-racist education, it is also part of a much
broader project. It is a moral and political pedagogical
theory whose purpose is to equip students with the vital
knowledge, skills, values, and sense of social responsibility
that enable them to be critical and engaged agents. In this
sense, it is the essential foundation, regardless of where
it takes place, for creating as knowledgeable and socially
responsible citizens necessary to combat all elements of
fascism and authoritarianism while envisioning a social
order that deepens and extends power, democratic values,
equitable social relations, collective freedom, economic
rights, and social justice for everyone. This is precisely
why it so dangerous to the white supremacists, fascists,
and extremist forces now driving politics in the United
States.
While the times
we live in seem dire, it is worthwhile to take heed from
Helen Keller who in a letter to Nazi youth stated: “History
hasn’t taught you anything if you think you can kill
ideas. The tyrants tried to do so often in the past, but
the ideas revolted against them and destroyed them.”
For Keller, history without hope is lost and opens the door
to fascism, while ideas that draw upon history and combine
with mass movements can serve to offer a model for fighting
fascism. Ellen Willis builds upon Keller’s sense of
hope when she once urged the left to become a movement again.
In doing so, she called for a new language, a new understanding
of education and a cultural politics that spoke to people’s
needs. Most importantly, she called for a “new vision
of what kind of society we want,” along with a mass
movement capable of “creating institutions…and
new ways of living to figure out how our vision might work.”
Not only were Willis’s insights prescient for the
times, but they are more urgent now given that the increasing
danger of fascism that threatens to engulf and destroy the
last vestiges of an already weakened democracy in the United
States.
