No
history is mute. No matter how much they own it,
break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut
its mouth.
Despite deafness and ignorance,
the time that was continues to tick inside the time that
is.
Eduardo Galeano
Canadians should
be looking carefully at America’s slide into authoritarianism.
There is a cost to ignoring how authoritarians attack political
and social rights, undermine public spheres, and disparage
democracy. The signals are obvious, especially under the
rule of GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. As a presidential
aspirant he is pursuing a hard-right agenda in his state,
one which he believes serves as a model for the rest of
America. His authoritarian agenda is evident in his banning
of books, use of state power to dictate school curricula,
embrace of white supremacy, and his abuse of political power
to punish corporations such as Disney that disagree with
his attack on LGBTQ people. All these actions are warning
signs of a history about to be repeated.
At the current
moment, it would be wise for Canadians to heed the words
of Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi who argued in
his book, In The Black Hole of Auschwitz, that
“Every age has its own fascism.” In his book,
The Voice of Memory, Levi elaborates on what he
considered the elemental features of fascism. He wrote:
Levi’s
words remind us of the importance of critical education
as a counterweight to the current language of hatred, bigotry,
and violence. It is an urgent call to not allow for the
erasure of history. It should remind educators of their
obligation to teach young people about the necessity of
not allowing the horrors of the past to be forgotten. It
is also a call to the public to defend and support educators
— who keep alive the notion of schools as crucial
democratic public spheres — in their efforts to teach
students how to think critically, empathize with others,
embrace the obligations of moral witnessing, and connect
knowledge to the power of self-reflection. It is a call
for an education that disturbs and inspires.
The role of
education has never been more important in Canada and in
other countries, especially at a time when it is under attack
across the globe by far-right radicals, intent on turning
schools and higher education into outposts of indoctrination,
bigotry, and propaganda. The challenge for educators and
others is to create a new language and mass social movement
that work to construct empowering terrains of education,
politics, justice, and culture that challenge existing systems
of white supremacy, white nationalism, manufactured ignorance,
and economic oppression.
Education is
the substance of politics, but it is rarely understood as
a site of struggle over agency, identities, values, and
the future itself. Education should be a practice of freedom
that embraces democratic values and its role as a public
good. Unfortunately, it can also be a force for domination.
One clear example of education as a practice of repression
is America’s gradual alignment with fascist politics
in which thinking becomes dangerous, censorship is normalized,
a culture of questioning is denounced, and institutions
that serve the public good begin to disappear.
If the civic
fabric and the democratic political culture that sustains
democracy are to survive, education must once again be linked
to matters of social justice, equity, human rights, memory,
and the public good. For Canadians and others, the task
of education is to encourage human agency, refresh the idea
of justice in individuals, and recognize that the world
can be different from how it is portrayed within an authoritarian
world view that poses a dire threat to democracy.
