In 1940, as Adolf Hitler gained more power and territory across a widening swath of Western Europe, the leaders of Norway’s democratically elected government fled Oslo and a Nazi puppet regime was installed. Among the first to protest the Nazi takeover of Norway were the country’s teachers. And since pins and badges with the likeness of the exiled king were now illegal, teachers and students used a clever, subtle signal to show their resistance. They wore paper clips.
Teachers wore the paper clips on their lapels to signify that they “remained united—bound together like a stack of papers—against Nazi rule.” As the threat of fascism spread, so too did the paper clip protests. Eventually, students took to wearing whole chains of paper clips like necklaces.
Frustrated that teachers proved so influential in undermining fascism through this simple act of protest, the Nazi regime eventually created its own pro-Nazi teacher network and mandated that all teachers in the country join it. But out of an estimated 14,000 teachers in Norway at the time, 12,000 refused to do so. So Nazis barged into the schools and beat teachers and students, trying to physically force them into submission. That didn’t work either.
So the Nazi government closed the schools. Hundreds of thousands of parents wrote letters to the government in protest. And what did Norway’s teachers do? They kept teaching. They held secret classes in private to promote critical thinking, access to information, and freedom of thought—even as, eventually, they were threatened with the worst fascist brutality imaginable.
Today, in the United States, teachers aren’t facing this kind of totalitarianism—at least not yet and hopefully never. But just like in the early moments of the Norwegian turn toward authoritarianism, we’re seeing clear warning signs of democratic backsliding. At both the state and federal level, far-right forces and wannabe dictators are smearing teachers, slashing public school funding, banning books, outlawing honest history, and expanding private school vouchers.
This year, Donald Trump gutted Department of Education funding that supports low-income students and students with disabilities and fired over half of the department’s staff. In 2024, the American Library Association tracked 821 efforts to censor library books and services. Between 2021 and 2024, far-right politicians in almost every single state introduced bills to try to censor teachers from talking about honest history or LGBTQ people; 21 states now have educational censorship laws on the books. Thirty states have voucher programs that take taxpayer money away from public schools and give it to private schools—which the Trump administration significantly expanded this summer through its misleadingly named “big, beautiful bill.” And last month, Oklahoma’s far-right education state superintendent—who previously required that every public school teach the Bible and use taxpayer money to purchase Trump Bible editions—introduced an “America First” test to screen teachers from “liberal” states.
Why? Why the constant, concerted attacks on our nation’s teachers and public schools? Because in the U.S. today—just as in Nazi-controlled Norway and Russia and Indonesia and Hungary and Chile—teachers instill the values, habits, and skills of democracy and pluralism and are the front line of its defense when democracy is threatened.
Teachers do four foundational things that are as important to our students as they are to the well-being of our nation. We impart knowledge, including critical thinking skills that prepare kids for their future and strengthen our democracy. We work to create welcoming and safe communities so we can meet children’s academic, social, and emotional needs. We create opportunity so every young person can have their shot at the American dream. And teachers are anchors of a labor movement whose purpose is to champion the aspirations of working families. In other words, teachers are not only an essential part of our children’s lives but an essential part of our republic. Fascists and far-right authoritarians aren’t smearing and undermining teachers because teachers are doing something wrong but because of everything teachers do right.
Our Founding Fathers understood this. And while they were far from perfect, they were clear that the American experiment relies on an educated, informed citizenry. John Adams wrote, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” Thomas Jefferson, who was an early advocate of free public education, wrote, “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people.… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” That’s why the motto of the 1.8 million-member strong American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, which I have the honor of leading, is “Democracy in education, education for democracy.” Public schools aren’t simply a by-product of democracy but democracy’s engine, constantly renewing and fueling the next generation to be informed and engaged in our unprecedented democratic experiment.
Of course, neither our nation’s democratic experiment nor our nation’s public schools have always lived up to our founding values of equality and justice for all. Instead, our nation’s story has been slowly yet steadily, with countless fits and starts, extending the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet still today, sadly, there are those who want to break that promise, attack pluralism, erode opportunity, and gut democracy—and see destroying public education as a means to that end.
In 2022, a right-wing activist named Chris Rufo gave a speech at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. Rufo is among those seeking to divide Americans from each other by turning the basic decency of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” into a politicized smear. The title of Rufo’s Hillsdale speech that day was “Laying Siege to the Institutions.” He said that “to get universal school choice you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” Rufo proposed a “siege strategy” and a “narrative war,” urging supporters to be “ruthless and brutal” in advancing their goals.
Rufo is by no means alone; he’s just the guy who said the quiet part out loud. To be clear, fascists and autocrats and far-right extremists don’t want to help all students, nor do they want to strengthen public schools. They don’t want students to learn about the painful parts of American history, and they don’t want to level the playing field for children living in abject poverty. Their goal is to exploit problems, not solve them. They want to divide us, otherizing those who are different while casting pluralism as the problem. These extremists try to pit us against each other and distract us so they can rig the system for themselves. When the far right gets enough people to believe that diversity is a threat and opportunity is a zero-sum game, they use the anger and resentment they foment to defund and destabilize public schools.
Take private school vouchers. In 2022, Arizona became the first state in the nation to enact universal vouchers, despite voters overwhelmingly voting to reject them. Data from Arizona reveal the true impact of handing over taxpayer money to private education. Vouchers go largely to the wealthiest zip codes in the state. Three out of four students who received them were already attending private school, which means those families could already afford private school tuition before they got taxpayer money. Some private schools raised tuition accordingly. Meanwhile, in 2024, just two years after universal vouchers took effect, Arizona faced a massive budget “meltdown”—a $1.4 billion black hole that nonpartisan researchers attributed mostly to vouchers.
Vouchers are not a solution to fix education—in fact “they have not produced academic gains for students,” reports Diane Ravitch, and, “if anything, such students often lose ground academically.” But fixing education isn’t the point. Vouchers—just like all of the far-right’s other attacks on teachers and public schools—are a strategy to end public education as we know it. Indeed, as of this writing, in the Phoenix area alone, 20 public schools have been shuttered as Arizona’s privatization scheme has expanded.
Ironically, there is one thing fascists and teachers agree on—that we cannot create a democratic, inclusive nation committed to opportunity for all without public schools. Summarizing why he attacked teachers and universities, Vladimir Putin once said, “Wars are won by teachers.” I couldn’t agree more. And that’s why we need every parent, every grandparent, every community member and leader to join with teachers in protecting public education.
That doesn’t mean we can’t also do things to make schools stronger. We must do that as well, striving to provide all children with a safe and welcoming environment, with a curriculum that is engaging and relevant, and teachers who help their students soar. That’s why our union has championed community schools with wraparound social services, career and technical education offerings in partnership with companies like Microsoft and Micron Technology, and teacher training and salary increases that ensure our public schools can attract and keep the best teachers possible.
At the same time, we have to stop falling for it when those who want to burn down public education pretend to be firefighters. The fascist strategy is to create problems so those problems can then be exploited to divide and distract us while the oligarchs and autocrats rig the system for themselves.
And what do teachers do? We keep teaching, just like teachers did in Norway. Even after the fascist government sent at least a thousand teachers to concentration camps and 500 others into forced labor, teachers kept helping students learn how to think for themselves. Because that’s what teachers do. And that’s the foundation stone of our democracy, marking the side of freedom, pluralism, justice, and opportunity for all—the values for which we all must now stand.
This essay is adapted from Why Fascists Hate Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy by Randi Weingarten (Thesis Books).
