We can still save education — and that’s the key to saving democracy

We live in a dangerous historical moment, when fascist politics are no longer lurking on the margins but inhabiting the centers of power. Across the globe, authoritarian regimes, from the U.S. to Hungary, India and Argentina, are gutting democracy, silencing dissent and merging culture and violence to impose updated forms of fascist politics.  This is nowhere more evident than in the assault on education.  Schools and universities, long viewed as spaces for critical thought, a culture of questioning, and civic development, are being transformed into ideological battlegrounds, reduced to mere appendages of corporate and state power, and subject to state violence. Journalists increasingly describe this as a war, a campaign of annihilation. In such times, the question is no longer whether education matters, but whether it can survive as a democratic force.

Under the Trump regime, ignorance has been manufactured and weaponized, twisted into a force that shrouds lies as truth and redefines education as an act of violence. In the U.S. and across other authoritarian regimes, a culture of lies along with the deliberate erasure of reality serves as a mask for tyranny. Trump, with his grotesque parade of over 30,000 lies during his first term, continues to poison the public mind, even now refusing to concede his loss in 2020. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, in a monstrous distortion, somehow blamed Marxists for the murder of a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota and her husband, a crime committed by a Trump supporter. This was no mere falsehood but a sickening expression of a deeper, unspeakable evil.

The right-wing media, spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch’s empire, lost a legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems over their lies about the election. Yet such lies and conspiratorial rhetoric continues to spread unchecked, drowning reason in its wake. The mainstream media is largely silent about Benjamin Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza, until they become too obvious to ignore. For the most part, it has also avoided discussing Donald Trump’s bombing of Iran as a violation of international and a reckless act of militarized violence. In the hands of the far-right and MAGA mobs, truth has become a dangerous weapon to be destroyed. Critical thinking, once a hallmark of an informed society, is now suspicious, and largely exiled from our libraries, schools and mainstream media.

The American public is sinking into a pit of civic illiteracy, a curse that will only grow as the complicity of so many feeds the machine of violence. This is not merely a crisis of knowledge; it is a catastrophe of reason, politics and morality, a national surrender to the forces of darkness and destruction. The growing threat of fascism thrives on the deliberate cultivation of ignorance, where lies are paraded as truth and a public all too willing to surrender to conspiracy theories finds solace in the comfort of unquestioned illiteracy. At stake is what David Levi Strauss, citing Jerome Kohn, calls “the public spirit” — the essence of democracy, where citizens engage in dialogue, debate and struggle, working together to promote the common good. In this perilous alliance, the very foundations of democracy are being torn asunder, and with them, any hope for a future brave enough to confront the truth.

The death of civic consciousness and the erosion of culture pave the way for a chilling fusion: the Disneyfication of society, where sanitized illusions mask brutal truths, and the rise of a zombie politics, ruled by the living dead — soulless figures with blood on their lips. As Chris Hedges has observed, America is a decaying regime, its vitality drained, clinging to spectacles like Trump’s grotesque military parade that serve only to feed the pathologies of a diseased society. Culture, under the grip of gangster capitalism, has become a vehicle for magical thinking, a tool for distracting the masses from the cruel realities of economic stagnation and social inequality.

In this world, the population is increasingly conditioned by a mass culture dominated by sexual commodification, mindless entertainment and graphic depictions of violence, and is taught to blame itself for its own failure. Thoughtlessness has not only been normalized but has become the very precondition for the rise of authoritarianism. This is the terrifying terrain we now occupy, where the loss of critical consciousness has created fertile ground for the spread of cruelty and control.

The first casualty of authoritarianism is the critical mind. This is not only a political issue but an educational one. As Paulo Freire understood, education is never neutral. It either functions as an instrument to reproduce the existing order or becomes a tool for liberation. In the face of escalating fascism, education demands reclamation as a moral and political project whose task is to cultivate the knowledge, skills, values and civic courage necessary to challenge injustice and imagine alternative futures. It must be rooted in critical pedagogy, a moral and political practice that enables students to speak, write and act from positions of agency and empowerment.

In the age of the neoliberal university, many educational institutions have abandoned these responsibilities. Under the weight of privatization, standardization and corporate influence, their democratic purpose has been hollowed out or abandoned entirely. Universities have become sites of credentialing, training and conformity, rather than inquiry and critique. Driven by the ideological and instrumental dictates of gangster capitalism, the logic of the market has reduced students to consumers, faculty to managed labor serfs and knowledge to a commodity.

Ranking systems, performance metrics and austerity budgets have supplanted public investment, intellectual freedom and pedagogical citizenship. As universities submit to far-right ideological pressure, chase corporate funding and refuse to define themselves as defenders of democracy, they abandon the mission of cultivating critical, engaged citizens capable of imagining a radically different future. Aligned with the forces of predatory capitalism, they erode public conscience “while celebrating unrestrained self-interest, extreme individualism, deregulation, and privatization.”

Yet an even more insidious force is at work. In addition to market-driven logic, higher education is being re-engineered to serve authoritarian control. In both subtle and overt forms, universities are increasingly being transformed into an apparatus of white Christian nationalist indoctrination and citadels of fear. They have been criminalized by the Trump administration and collectively transformed into an enormous crime scene. What we witness across the country is not merely the erosion of democratic education, but its replacement by a theocratic and ethnonationalist vision rooted in exclusion, historical erasure and moral authoritarianism. Curricula are being purged of “divisive concepts,” anti-racist scholarship is demonized, and educators who teach about settler colonialism, gender or Palestinian liberation are being censored, surveilled or fired.

In the New Republic, Indigo Olivier argues that Trump’s war on education extends beyond the suppression of campus dissent. It is a concerted effort to seize the essence of higher learning, reshaping it in the image of authoritarian ideology, an ideology built on power, control and the erasure of critical thought:

In recent months, Trump has: signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, suspended student loan repayment programs and $400 million in funding to Columbia University, and threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after freezing over $2 billion in federal funds. Dozens of universities now face federal investigations as part of Trump’s anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion campaign. Perhaps most disturbingly, he has encouraged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to target international students involved in Gaza solidarity protests for deportation; several are currently being held in a processing facility in Louisiana…. Taken together, these actions have been widely seen as a chilling assault on academic freedom and institutional self-governance that threatens to undermine the character of American higher education itself.

This project mirrors, with chilling precision, the ideological reengineering of higher education under past fascist regimes. In Nazi Germany, universities were purged of Jewish professors and political dissidents, while academic disciplines were reshaped to propagate racial pseudoscience and Aryan supremacy. In Mussolini’s Italy, intellectuals were coerced into swearing loyalty to the fascist state, and scholarship became a tool of nationalist propaganda, intertwining classical myths with imperial ambition.

As Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, “Leftists, liberals, and anyone who spoke out against the Fascists were sent to prison or forced into exile.” In Franco’s Spain, the university was subjected to Catholic authoritarianism, with philosophy, history and literature marshaled to serve an ultra-conservative, patriarchal order. In Chile, as Ben-Ghiat writes, under the brutal regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet, universities were condemned as “hotbeds of Marxism and targeted…for ‘cleansing.’ She notes that by 1975, 24,000 students, faculty, and staff had been dismissed, thousands imprisoned and tortured, and entire philosophy and social science departments disbanded.

In an article at The Conversation, education scholar Iveta Silova notes how swiftly and systematically German universities were transformed under Hitler: “Within a few years, German universities no longer served knowledge, they served power.” The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle DEI programs, censor dissenting faculty and freeze funding to elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard echo this dangerous legacy. These are not random acts but part of a calculated attempt to remake higher education into an instrument of ideological control. The pattern is clear: Authoritarian leaders understand that universities must either serve the state or be silenced.

In each case, fascist regimes recognized what many Americans understand: Education is a powerful site for shaping memory, constructing identity and legitimizing power. Today’s attacks on academic freedom in Florida, Texas and beyond, where bills ban courses on systemic racism, rewrite histories of slavery and Indigenous genocide, and promote “patriotic education,” are not aberrations but continuities in a long history of authoritarian attempts to control the imagination of the future by erasing the truths of the past.

Under Trump, this war on education has reached a fever pitch, with the attacks on Columbia and Harvard  serving as key elements of a broader strategy. By branding campus protesters as “terrorists,” labeling faculty as “enemies of America,” invoking false allegations of antisemitism against any vestige of dissent and threatening to revoke federal funding, Trump is mobilizing state power to crush intellectual resistance and remake the university in the image of racial purity, blind obedience, and de facto white and Christian nationalist mythology.

Yet even amid this reactionary onslaught, resistance is burgeoning. Across campuses in the U.S., Canada and around the world, students and educators are refusing to be conscripted into authoritarian narratives. From the pro-Palestinian encampments protesting genocide in Gaza to the nationwide student walkouts opposing book bans and censorship, young people are transforming educational spaces into laboratories of dissent and collective imagination. These acts of defiance recall earlier waves of resistance, from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley to the student uprisings in 1968 Paris, from the Black campus revolts of the 1970s to the anti-apartheid university occupations of the 1980s, as well as a historical moment when women, refusing to be confined by patriarchal norms, broke through the walls of misogyny to demand autonomy, equality and liberation.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Resonating with past movements, today’s students are reclaiming education as an act of resistance, not a preparation for conformity and ideological indoctrination. They are forming assemblies, teach-ins and counter-courses, horizontal spaces where knowledge is co-created, solidarity is forged and the university is reimagined as a site of justice rather than domination. Faculty, too, are pushing back, filing lawsuits, penning public letters, creating sanctuary classrooms and insisting that pedagogy must serve not power but freedom. This is why fascists hate higher education and are waging a full-fledged attack on it.

In this context, critical pedagogy transcends mere academic method; it becomes a political act, a refusal to surrender the university to fascism and a commitment to making it a space where new forms of collective life can be imagined and fought for. In cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, students are joining with immigrants, workers, artists, activists and some politicians to resist Trump’s ruthless immigration policies, the criminalization of dissent “and his unfolding conspiracy to establish a military dictatorship under his personal control.” This convergence of struggles signals a growing recognition that education cannot be separated from the broader fight for human rights, sanctuary and democratic life — resistance movements now under threat from the unfolding authoritarianism of Trump’s regime. It is through these alliances that a new critical pedagogy of resistance is emerging, one rooted in memory, insurgent hope and an unshakable belief in the possibility of a different future.

Drawing upon the lessons of history and the radical value of critical education, the Foro de Sevilla collective writes, “Auschwitz was much more than a concentration camp, it was a laboratory of dehumanization.” Gaza, too, has become such a site, where children, schools and entire futures are being systematically annihilated. Education, in this context, is not just about knowledge transmission but about moral reckoning. It must preserve memory as a living force, capable of shaping civic courage and alerting us to the dangers of silence, complicity and ideological manipulation. From Auschwitz to Gaza, from Nazi Germany to Trump’s America, we see the same dangerous arc: a politics of exclusion that depends on erasure, that turns classrooms into sites of fear rather than freedom.

To meet this moment, educators must embrace a form of pedagogy that is inseparable from politics. Critical pedagogy begins not with answers, but with probing questions about history, justice, identity, power and possibility. It refuses the notion that teaching is a technical act, a homage to an empty instrumentalism divorced from context, insisting instead that education is always implicated in the struggle over meaning and memory. As Pierre Bourdieu warned, some of the most powerful forms of domination are symbolic and pedagogical. If authoritarian regimes aim to control not only public institutions but the public imagination, then our task as educators is to illuminate, disrupt, protest and reimagine. In this struggle, education and culture are not peripheral. They are central to politics, for shaping mass consciousness is the bedrock of any genuine resistance.

Education does not exist in a vacuum, but on a battleground for identities, values and power. As such, it carries the potential to either suppress or empower — or often, to be a complex mix of both. Freire warns us that pedagogy can become a tool of oppression when it reinforces entrenched power structures. Yet he powerfully extends this argument by emphasizing that education is a site of struggle, where its potential for both oppression and liberation is constantly negotiated. It can awaken consciousness, empower individuals and resist the forces of injustice. In this sense, education becomes a critical site where the struggle for freedom, dignity and transformation is waged.

Let us be clear: the relentless attacks on higher education by authoritarians like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and the Trump regime at home expose a deeper truth: Universities have always been incubators of resistance to authoritarianism and its ever-shifting forms of fascist politics. This is precisely why they are viewed as a threat. As public institutions, their core mission is to defend and nurture democracy, however fragile or imperfect, making them a formidable challenge to those who seek to dismantle it.

This means embracing education as a public good and a site of collective responsibility. It requires curricula that foster a culture of inquiry, equip students with the knowledge and skills to hold power accountable, challenge dominant narratives, and cultivate a historical literacy that can dismantle the myths sustaining fascist ideologies. It calls for defending the university not as a corporate entity or site of theocratic indoctrination but as a democratic commons — a space where a culture of critique and academic freedom can thrive, and where students are empowered to define themselves and break free from the continuum of manufactured ignorance. It demands a language that links freedom with social responsibility, agency with solidarity and critical thought with civic engagement.

As Homi Bhabha once said, civic education must disrupt the consensus of common sense. It must fracture the settled order of things to make space for the not-yet-imagined. In an age where language is stripped of meaning and culture is weaponized by the far right, education must reclaim its capacity to name injustice and summon hope. We need a language of critique and a language of possibility. One that refuses both fatalism and false neutrality.

As the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis has observed, there is no democracy without an educated public and no justice without a language to critique injustice. In dark times, education must do more than transmit knowledge; it must cultivate the political and moral imagination necessary to resist tyranny and build a future rooted in equality, dignity and shared responsibility. To make education central to politics is to insist that the fight for democracy begins not only in the streets or at the ballot box, but in the classroom, in the slow, transformative work of teaching people to think otherwise, so they might act otherwise.

As Castoriadis reminds us, democracy is not merely the absence of censorship or the formal guarantee of rights, it is the collective power of the people to shape the conditions of their own existence. Its antithesis is unfolding before our eyes under Trump: a regime that wields power not to serve the public good but to impose a form of internal military occupation, hollowing out the very foundations of democracy and replacing them with fear, surveillance and authoritarian control. From Nazi Germany to Mussolini’s Italy to Orbán’s Hungary and Trump’s America, the pattern is disturbingly familiar: The attack on education always precedes the broader collapse of democratic life. The classroom is one of the last spaces where the future can still be imagined differently. That is why it is under siege, and why we must defend it with everything we have.

The stakes of resisting fascism and fighting for radical democracy — both in the U.S. and globally — could not be more dire. In an age when authoritarianism works to erase memory, dismantle agency and extinguish the very conditions for democratic life, education must be reclaimed as a radical act of hope and resistance. We must reject the cynical belief that schools are mere sites of economic, social and political reproduction, powerless in the face of capital and coercion. We must reclaim them instead as contested spaces where the struggle over meaning, history and possibility is ongoing.

As Stuart Hall has insisted, culture and, by extension, education “is a critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled.” The task before us is not simply to critique the fascist drift of our institutions, but to organize, teach and fight for an emancipatory vision of education, one rooted in historical memory, ethical responsibility and collective imagination. Against the politics of cruelty and Trump’s empire of ugliness, cruelty and communities of racial hatred, we need a pedagogy of solidarity. Against the forces that would erase the past, malign the present and cancel the future, we must teach, and live, as if the future depends on our refusal to forget, our capacity to dream and our courage to act. Because it does.