Photo by Nathan Dumlao, Unsplash
Photo by Nathan Dumlao, Unsplash
As anti-education laws sweep the nation, political education offers communities the tools to resist authoritarianism, reclaim truth, and build collective power.
Republished with permission from Common Dreams, by Fouzia Chaparro-Bencheikh
Banned books. Silenced teachers. Erased histories. These aren’t education policies—they’re authoritarian tactics. As of December 31, 2022, 28 states have introduced at least one anti-education measure at the state level, including legislation, executive directives, and policies. Of these, 16 states have specifically enacted anti-education legislation. Concurrently, we’re facing a new wave of fascism in the United States.
The executive branch under Trump is eroding checks and balances, impacting the civil and political rights of all people residing in the country, citizen or non-citizen alike. This moment demands that we fight for political education, the process of learning about power, systems of oppression, and collective action, so people can understand the world around them and organize to transform it. While it may feel like history repeating itself—from Mussolini’s Italy to McCarthy’s America—this moment is ours to confront. Political education is the antidote to help us resist fascism in all facets of society.
I. The Crisis We Face
The backlash to the 2020 racial justice uprisings has come swiftly and systematically. During the 2020 uprisings, we saw waves of education online and in the streets. In the wake of the largest protests in U.S. history, right-wing groups mobilized to stop the political awakening of a generation. Christopher Rufo, alongside organizations like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, helped spearhead anti-CRT bills and book ban campaigns aimed at silencing truth-telling in schools. Even before these attacks, the U.S. faced a civic education crisis.
Most Americans lacked a basic understanding of how their government works or the history that shaped it. These bills will exacerbate that crisis for decades, ensuring that American citizens are kept in the dark about their history and understanding how that history has brought the country to the current moment. This assault on truth is intentional and by design—it’s a deliberate strategy by right-wing operatives to suppress knowledge and prevent resistance. Without this basic knowledge, Americans lack the tools and awareness to know how to create equity and justice in our society.
II. What Is Political Education—and Why It Matters
Political education is not just learning about politics—it’s learning how to change them. Although this is a perilous moment in American history, we aren’t powerless against forces that would keep us in the dark. Political education is how communities can begin to exercise their agency and take back their power. Yet many people have never heard of political education, or confuse it with basic civics.
Political education develops the ability to recognize power and how it is wielded, builds collective power, and equips people with the skills to take action to create transformative change. With classrooms becoming restricted spaces, political education is something that can happen outside of the classroom. It can happen in book clubs, kitchen table conversations with neighbors and friends, livestreams, theaters, and more.
Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized Freedom Schools in 1964 to teach Black youth about Black history, political power, and the struggle for civil rights, creating a wave of lifelong organizers working towards Black liberation. The Highlander Center, a training center for organizers and civil rights leaders, many of whom led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and shaped the strategies of the broader Civil Rights Movement.
The 2020 uprisings sparked a wave of political education online. Abolitionist organizations and organizers like Critical Resistance, Mariame Kaba, and others educated people online, offering options beyond policing and incarceration. Many of these individuals and groups created online content like Instagram explainers, live teach-ins, podcasts, and toolkits. Political education created spaces for people to learn in solidarity and build a shared vision of a world where no one is left without the resources they need to thrive.
III. Political Education as Resistance
The political education that arose out of the 2020 uprisings is something that right-wing politicians and figures who are leading the anti-education policies want to prevent in the future. When people come together to learn with and from one another, not only are they expanding their awareness and possibilities for the future, but they also form communities of solidarity that make transformation possible.
Successful political education that leads to action includes a few key ingredients. The first is connecting history to the current political moment to understand how we got to the present. It requires awareness of local, national, and international history and naming the systems of oppression that are entrenched in the present day—white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, ableism, and authoritarianism.
The next ingredient is helping learners develop critical consciousness, a term coined by the educational theorist Paulo Freire. Critical consciousness helps learners gain a deeper understanding of the world through analyzing systems and structures of power. Developing critical consciousness connects personal experiences to broader social and political forces.
Another key component of political education is a proactive learning community. Learners are encouraged to be both students and educators in a political education space, prioritizing participatory dialogue over lectures. This helps build collective analysis, group processing, conflict and resolution skills, and problem-solving. By generating knowledge collectively, learners realize that transformative change isn’t driven by individual leaders, but by collective action. The ultimate goal of political education is to move people from awareness to group action in order to change their material conditions and environment.
IV. “Where to Start Your Political Education”
Despite attempts to stifle truth and education in the classroom, groups are providing political education nationwide, doing their part to develop new movement leaders ready to strengthen movements.
- Zinn Education Project—The Zinn Education Project is one of the organizations across the country raising awareness of the anti-education bills across the nation, and also providing teaching materials on teaching Reconstruction, Climate Change, Palestine, and much more.
- The People’s Forum—The People’s Forum is another organization specializing in political education with study groups, film screenings, events, and more.
- Slow Factory’s Open Edu—Slow Factory, an organization that has a bustling social media presence, hosts Open Edu a series that focuses on political education on topics of human rights, climate justice, and collective liberation.
- Local mutual aid groups and community centers—There are local organizations across the nation providing workshops, study groups, and other third spaces where people can connect, learn, and struggle together.
V. Final Message: You Have a Role
Fascism is the most potent when silent—when it rewrites textbooks, silences educators, and erases memory. The ultimate goal of these anti-education bills is to enable more fascism and to stop people and movements from mobilizing into action.
If you feel powerless, unsure how to act, or outraged by the attacks on education, the most powerful thing you can do is to prioritize learning in community to create change. When truth is under attack, teaching and learning become an act of resistance, and we need all of us in that fight.
Common Dreams has been providing breaking news & views for the progressive community since 1997. They are independent, non-profit, advertising-free and 100% reader supported.
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