“Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes this sentence amidst thinking about a school district in South Carolina debating whether or not to ban his book Between the World and Me and to fire the teacher, Mary, who assigned it in her Advanced Placement English course. As I reread The Message alongside Kristen Ghodsee’s Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women and Jason Stanley’s Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, I keep thinking, again and again, about the role of education and, more importantly, the liberal arts, in the formation and maintaining of democracy. I think about Henry Grioux who points out, as does Audre Lorde, Stanley, and countless others, that education is political, no matter what one does; however, he add that while “we cannot eliminate politics, . . . we can work against a politics of certainty, a pedagogy of censorship, and institutional forms that close down rather than open up democratic relations.”

Individuals become afraid, as we have seen, of these “democratic relations,” the expanding of ideas that challenge their very positions and the very ways that they view themselves when they gaze upon their own reflection. If we proclaim and seek democracy, we must be open to conversations, collaboration, and a desire to confront those reflections that revel to us our real selves, the beauty and the beast that resides within our very beings as both individuals and a nation. Art, history, music, film and countless other mediums and fields of study help us to do this, but, as Coates argues, literature works different because “books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see.” Unlike other mediums, books have an essence of solitariness.

Last year, I attended a book talk with David Joy for his latest novel Those We Thought We Knew. During his talk, he echoed Coates while adding that when we read a book we cannot escape. We can have any emotion we want as we face the world that the author introduces us to and that the mirror that the author places in front of our faces. We can throw the book to the floor. We can rip out pages. We can destroy it. Yet, the book remains. We may have defiled one copy of the book, but it remains, screaming at us to confront ourselves and our own deficiencies. Calling upon us to imagine a better world that may not see us at the top but may see everyone on equal footing. Pleading and imploring us to partake in the opening of “democratic relations.” This engagement, notably the placement of the mirror in front of oneself, is what individuals fear, especially those who have the power to shape and control politics and what gets taught in the classroom.

We know that authoritarianism and fascism thrive on misinformation and the removal of knowledge from the public square, and the classroom serves as ground zero for this move to shape society in a manner that benefits the powerful and denies any progression towards a true democracy. Stanley points out that “[e]rasing history helps authoritarians because doing so allows them to misrepresent a single story, a single perspective,” but they cannot, no matter how hard they try, erase it completely. The fight over education and the constructions of a national myth are nothing new, as we know. During the early years of the United States, countless debates over the nation’s founding arose from discussions about the Pilgrims, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others. Yet, while powerful whites sought to tailor these myths to fit their image of the world and their position, others pushed back. For Jefferson there was David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. For Daniel Webster there was William Apess. For Rebecca Felton there was Ida B. Wells. For Phyllis Schlafly there was Audre Lorde. For Eugene Talmadge there was Lillian Smith. We could go on an on.

Access to knowledge is paramount to a thriving society, whether it be democratic, socialist, or something in between. Ghodsee makes this point abundantly clear when she writes about Nadezhda Krupskaya, Vladimir Lenin’s wife. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Krupskaya started libraries, expanded education for everyone, and expanded women’s rights, all of which Joseph Stalin would walk back in the ensuing decades. Krupskaya saw “the goal of education,” as Ghodsee puts it, “[is] to teach children and workers to think independently while also understanding the value of organized collective action.”

In her 1918 essay “Concerning the Question of Socialist Schools,” Krupskaya writes,

In a bourgeois state — whether it is a monarchy or a republic — the school serves as an instrument for the spiritual enslavement of broad masses. Its objective in such a state is determined not by the interest of the pupils but by those of the ruling class, i.e. the bourgeoisie, and the interests of the two often differ quite substantially. The school’s objective determines the entire organization of school activities, the entire structure of school life and the entire substance of school education.

There is a reason why battles over democracy and the image of the nation center on education and schools. Those in power seek to maintain their power through education, through the “spiritual enslavement of broad masses.” In this manner, they craft a populace that comes to believe in the national myths that they seek to craft, national myths that work to benefit themselves at the cost of society and democracy. We have seen what this limiting of knowledge has done. We need only look back to 1933 and the book burnings in Nazi Germany and in the list of books that the Nazi’s deemed “divisive” to their enterprise. Or, we need only look to our own shores to the United Daughters of the Confederacy who did the same in the Southern United States, even publishing a pamphlet entitled “A Measuring Rod to the Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries.” If they found a book did a “disservice” to the South, they would stamp it “Unjust to the South.”

Stanley points out that “[e]ducational authoritarianism is frequently accompanied by more general restrictions on knowledge, and by attempts to push mythic representations in place of that knowledge.” These attacks seek to, as Krupskaya wrote about seeing schools in Geneva during the early twentieth century, “train students “to be docile slaves” who do not question or learn. Instead, they merely serve as a means for students to “bank” knowledge and regurgitate it back to the teacher, merely memorizing, not engaging critically, with the information.

Paulo Freire, who was influenced by Krupskaya, puts it this way, “The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that worlds.” Without the “critical consciousness,” what do students become? Do they have the tools to “open up democratic relationships”? Do they have the ability to determine misinformation and disinformation? Or, do they merely become “docile slaves” with move about their lives without any collaboration or meaningful interaction with their own selves, others, and society? Do they merely exist as the next wave of workers for the wealthy in power?

A “critical consciousness” is important to one’s education because it provides us with the ability to engage with the world around us instead of merely walking blindly over the earth until we pass back to it. However, “critical thinking,” as Stanley notes, “is not a panacea against fascism — some of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers, including the philosopher Marin Heidegger, were fascists.” While it does not serve as a panacea, “critical consciousness” does open the door for students to walk through, and many do just that once they learn about the information and ideas kept hidden from them. I recall two such students a few years back in a composition course. One student wanted to argue that Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the National Anthem was wrong, but over the course of research and writing the paper, the student’s mind changed. While they still felt that Kaepernick should not kneel during the anthem, the student understood and did not feel antagonism for him anymore. Another student started researching their home school system and learned about segregation schools and current efforts to maintain de facto segregation in the community. This student sought to educate others and enact change.

If the role of education, as so many of us proclaim, is to instruct students on how to become productive citizens of the nation, how do we do that when so many want to reinstitute the role of education in the service of making it system that reinforces hierarchies and oppression? At the end of Erasing History, Stanley references his father’s research on this subject. Manfred Stanley wrote that we need “civic friendship” and “civic compassion” if we want the democratic experiment to succeed. He writes, “Civic friendship, remember, is that concept which signifies the underlying equality of regard which all persons are supported to have for each other as citizens despite their diverse positions in the social division of labor.” “Civic friendship” means building bridges and being open to diverse opinions and positions. It means respect for our neighbors.

These bridges are a stalwart against fascism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism because once we respect others we form compassion for them and care about what happens to them. We have failed the test of “civic compassion,” and as Manfred notes, once we fail the “[m]uch less demanding tests” on the path to totalitarianism, we come face to face with the final test of “civic compassion,” the test that asks us how we feel about our fellow citizens. Fascists use abstractions to diminish “civic compassion,” creating “enemies” both within and without, abstract manifestations of fear. However, Manfred points out, “[c]ompassion is more concrete and a more reasonable expectation to have of people,” and once that compassion evaporates, we devolve into the manifestations of fear.

Empathy arises from seeing the world through the perspectives of others, specifically those who are not like us. Fascists seek to curtail this through telling educators what they can teach in the classroom because the classroom becomes the first place where students will encounter individuals who have different experiences than themselves. Removing the stories of others, specifically Black, LGBTQ, Hispanic, immigrant, Palestinian, Muslim, and other voices, fascists present those individuals as less than human and not worthy, erasing them from existence. For white students, this limits their ability to form “civic compassion” with anyone who has had different experiences, and for non-white, non-cisgender, non-heterosexual students it tells them they are not worthy of citizenship and participation in civic society.

Stanley points out that his father’s view of “civic compassion” called upon us “to engage respectfully, to imaginatively stand in the places of others, to inhabit worlds that initially seem strange and even threatening, to acknowledge one’s inability to be as wise, as generous, or as open as pluralistic democracy requires.” In essence, it calls upon us to step outside of ourselves and to learn about those whom we inhabit terrafirma with, no matter how far apart we reside. It calls upon us to see our common humanity, even amidst our different experiences. As James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

Coates states that what fascists and white supremacists feared most in the protests of 2020 was not the actions in the streets. No, Coates says, “what they were ultimately fighting was the word,” the power of knowledge and the ways that that knowledge becomes a weapon to usher in “civic compassion,” equality, equity, and new ways of imagining our shared world. Power does not gve up charitably. It tightens its grip and refuses to relinquish it until the last gasp. Art causes power to tighten its grip because it causes fear “not for what it does today but,” as Coates writes, “what it augers for tomorrow — a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced.”

What do we do? How do we counteract fascist attempts to erase knowledge having students “storing the deposits entrusted to them” in order to create “docile slaves”? At the end of Red Valkyries, Ghodsee offers nine steps to combat not just fascism’s attacks on education but fascism’s attacks on every aspect of society. They are comrades, humility, autodidacticism, receptivity, aptitude, coalition, tenacity, engagement, and repose. Each of these are important, pointing to ways to make a better world, but as we think about education, Ghodsee’s comments on autodidacticism stand out in relation to Stanley and Coates. Ghodsee writes, “Autodidacticism recognizes that the acquisition of relevant knowledge provides fuel and inspires creative thinking among those of us interested seeing the world not at it is but as it should be.”

We can, through knowledge and education, imagine the world we want to exist. Do we want that world to create “docile slaves” under fascism and authoritarianism? Or, do we want to create a world with “civic compassion” and “civic friendship”? I call for the latter, a world where we work together for the betterment of society, for those we share this world with and for those who will inherit it once we leave this mortal coil. Knowledge, words, education, literature, and art help us imagine this future. They help us see what is possible. They do what Coates says about young writers, their “task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”

Writing to an English teacher who asked her to give some advice to his students about education and writing, Lillian Smith downplayed the importance of formal education, pointing out the “banking” system students engaged with. However, she told the students to become autodidacts, to engage with knowledge, with art. She told them to become lifelong learners, from now until their deaths. She concludes, “I don’t know when learning stops. But I know a writer never stops learning, not ever — until she is dead as a creative being. When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die: time to crawl into that small room and put the cover over you.”

This is what fascists fear, lifelong learners who imagine new worlds, who imagine a world for everyone, who challenge their positions. With this in mind, what will we choose to do? Will we choose to succumb to attacks on education? Or, will we dare to imagine a better world?