By: William Ayers

William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired), is an activist and scholar currently teaching writing courses with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project in Chicago. His books include Teaching the Taboo; To Teach: The Journey, in Comics; about Becoming a Teacher, and most recently, To Teach (Fourth Edition) (Teachers College Press, 2025).

“Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values in schools that want federal taxpayer funding. So as we close the Department of Education and provide funding to states, we’re going to make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology. For any nation to be successful, it cannot teach its children to hate themselves and to hate their country.”

—Stephen Miller, Senior Advisor to Donald Trump

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

—James Baldwin

It’s axiomatic: authoritarian and autocratic regimes work relentlessly to suppress the essential guardians of democracy: dissent, free thought, and independent inquiry. Totalitarian rule is on the rise here and in many other parts of the world, and education is not some random collateral damage—it’s an early and fundamental target. When any government campaigns against, and then moves to subdue, free thought and inquiry in order to crush protest and an honest accounting of history, the slide toward tyranny is underway.

Vice President JD Vance has called American universities “the enemy,” and, to compete with existing institutions, President Trump has proposed creating his own national, degree-granting, online university that would teach only the “truth” as he sees it. The administration is destroying the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science Foundation. Further, the federal government is withdrawing financial support for museums, archives, and universities, promoting book-banning, and scrubbing government websites of “objectionable” words and phrases (Gulf of Mexico, discrimination, diversity, equity, women, and underrepresented)—all hallmarks of autocrats, and each a piece of a broad campaign to subjugate the arts, science, and intellectual life itself.

Given the sheer speed and force of the orders and actions flying out of the White House, it can seem as though they are somehow random. They are not. The chaos is intentional, designed to break our brains and keep our heads spinning. But all the activity represents a coherent ideology: privatization is always good, and anything public is suspect and should be snuffed out; individualism is good, and the commons or the community is bad; poor people, immigrants from poor countries, Indigenous people, and people of African ancestry are disposable. These are the fixed and fundamental frames of the executive orders.

Note, however, that our road to perdition is built on a culture characterized by hyper-individualism, shaped by an unresolved legacy of white supremacy, and drunk on consumerism. Further, the path is paved with bipartisan agreement on every major issue. For years, both leading Democrats and key Republicans alike have advanced corporate restructuring schemes, promoted “school choice as a strategy for overall school improvement,” and bought into the myth that high stakes standardized test scores are a valid measure of teacher effectiveness—all terrible moves that have undermined robust, well-funded public schools as a community need and a fundamental human right. For MAGA, all this serves to reach an obvious endpoint: the elimination of the Department of Education and, eventually, the death of public education altogether.

This goal—spelled out in Project 2025—is framed in the seductive language of freedom: “Education [should be] publicly funded but education decisions are made by families,” and “Every parent should have the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding.” What this means in practice is that public schools are being systematically starved of resources. Parents will be given a check to spend on their child’s schooling, including at religious or private schools, but the amount of the check will be inadequate to afford the fees of the most excellent schools—no one is taking a state voucher to Exeter or Andover or Sidwell Friends, but the wealthy people who already send their kids to those elite schools will now get a taxpayer-funded cut to their tuition bill.

The way forward is to develop an independent North Star, a new vision of a flourishing and livable future, and then get busy organizing projects to resist, reimagine, and rebuild.

In education this means rejecting the false promises and failed policies that got us here. It means stating and developing our broad values and our clearest vision of what should be or could be, but is not yet. It also means remembering that schools don’t exist outside of history or culture: they are, rather, at the heart of each. As both mirror and window, schools show us what society values. Authoritarian societies are served by authoritarian schools, just as free schools support free societies. If you know that a given society is fascist—Italy or Germany in the 1930’s, say—certain classroom characteristics are entirely predictable: the tone will be authoritative, the discipline will be harsh, the pedagogy domineering, the curriculum manipulative and dishonest. Conversely, if you visit a school and see those same qualities, you can predict that the larger society is hierarchical and imperious, even if it wraps itself in high and noble phrases like the Fatherland or the Homeland, Patriotism or Freedom. This doesn’t mean that authoritarian schools with their propagandistic curriculum, manipulative relationships, and harsh, coercive methods, necessarily produce people without skills—Nazi Germany turned out brilliant doctors and scientists, artists and athletes, as well as an obedient population that participated in or looked away as their fellow human beings were marched to the death camps.

From the perspective of a humane, democratic, and free society the authoritarian approach is always backward; democracy demands active, thinking human beings, and an education designed to empower and to enable that goal. Furthermore, a vital democracy requires participation, some tolerance and acceptance of difference, independent thought, and a spirit of mutuality. It requires all of us to exercise our own agency as well as to learn to live together.

Education is a fundamental human right and a basic community responsibility—that’s the starting point. Every child, simply by being born, has the right to a free, accessible, high-quality public education. That means that a decent, generously staffed school facility must be in easy reach for every family—this is not difficult to envision; it’s what the most privileged parents have for their children right now—small class sizes, fully trained and well-compensated teachers, physics and chemistry labs, sports teams, physical education, athletic fields and gymnasiums, afterschool and summer programs, and generous arts programs that include music, theater, and fine arts. This is the baseline for what we want for all the children of our communities. Anything less weakens and then destroys democracy.


To Teach (Fourth Edition)