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Teachers Teach Critical Thinking
In October 2022, about a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, I led a small delegation of educators and health professionals to visit the Ukrainian city of Lviv. We met with teachers and their union to find out what the international community could do to help them and their students recover.
My wife, Sharon, is a rabbi and joined me because she deeply understands ministry amid trauma, across generations and contexts. And on our way to Ukraine, entering through Poland, we made a point to stop at the Janusz Korczak Monument in Warsaw.
Henryk Goldszmit was born to a Polish Jewish family, trained as a pediatrician, but reached acclaim as a children's book author under his pen name Janusz Korczak. But Korczak wanted to do even more to help children. So he became a teacher.
In 1912, Korczak took a position as the director of an orphanage for Jewish children, which he organized as a tiny democracy. The students had a newspaper, a parliament, and even a court where they would hear and resolve grievances. Korczak thought it was important for his students to think critically and freely, especially as the space for free thinking was closing up all around them. He taught them the value of democracy, even as the world around them was sliding into autocracy. The memorial Sharon and I visited sits on the site of the former orphanage. It shows Korczak with a thoughtful gaze, his arms gently resting around a gaggle of children, one of whom stares up at him with the same look of reverence that I feel.
Nazis had already gone after Jewish children attending German schools. In 1938, Jewish students were completely banned from them. In 1940, when the Nazis created the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, Korczak's orphanage was forced to move there and Korczak, of course, went with his children. As fascism was closing in all around him, he kept teaching his students how to free their minds. But then, in August 1942, the Nazi genocide came for Korczak's Jewish students. Nazis came to round up the 190 or so orphans under Korczak's charge. Korczak dressed the kids up and each of them carried a favorite toy or game. Korczak walked with his students to help them keep calm. And though Korczak himself was offered sanctuary, in part because of his fame, he refused. He insisted on staying with his students. Korczak walked with his young students, and together they boarded the train that would ultimately take them to concentration camps. They were never heard from again.
When Sharon and I walked along those same train tracks, we reflected on Korczak's devotion as a teacher-literally guiding his students in every way, shepherding them until the very end. And we reflected on his simple act of rebellion-daring to teach children to think for themselves and be themselves amid encroaching autocracy. The goal of education in the Third Reich and fascism in general is indoctrination of youth-trying to compel young people to embrace only certain ideas and certain people. Critical thinking is the antidote. Critical thinking means you form your own ideas and your own opinions about the world, based on your own knowledge and analysis, not blind loyalty or fear. Fascists, autocrats, and other extremists are afraid of critical thinking and they fear teachers because teachers teach critical thinking that is foundational to a free, knowledge-based society. The ability to reason through complex problems, to separate fact from fiction and information from disinformation, to apply reasoning and form one's own opinions is central to knowledge and essential to the very democracy that fascists and autocrats want to destroy. Fascist attacks on critical thinking are part of a concerted strategy. As philosopher Umberto Eco observed about the same era of fascism in Italy, "All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning."
In 1924, Korczak wrote that students "should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be-the unknown person inside each of them is our hope for the future." That hope-that boundless possibility of self-actualization in every young person-is disruptive to fascism and essential to democracy. Korczak fought for that hope, that self-actualization, with every fiber of his being. That's what great teachers do-no matter what. And critical thinking has been central to public education in the United States since our nation's founding. Because our Founding Fathers understood what Korczak knew-that a free society depends on free minds.
The Founders' Case for Public Education
The founding of our nation and the creation of public education have always been intertwined. James Madison, who helped draft the Constitution and served as the fourth president of the United States, called education "the only Guardian of true liberty." Madison once wrote, "The American people owe it to themselves, and to the cause of free Government, to prove by their establishments for the advancement and diffusion of Knowledge . . . What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty & Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?"
Indeed, there were early versions of public schools in America even before the United States became a nation. The Boston Latin School was founded in 1635, well before the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was funded by public money, though it was only open to male students (women weren't admitted until 337 years later, in 1972). Some of Boston Latin School's early students would go on to help forge our new nation-students including John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Franklin.
It was Horace Mann who really expanded public education in the United States. In the mid-1800s, as secretary of the Board of Education in Massachusetts, Mann started a movement for "common schools." They were called common schools not because they were plain-though they definitely were by today's standards-but common in the sense of "common good." "Education," argued Mann, "beyond all other divides of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men-the balance wheel of the social machinery."
As education professor Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire write, "Universal, taxpayer-supported schooling was initially a civic project. The aim was to ensure the kinds of basic competencies for all young people that had for so long been the exclusive preserve of the middle and upper classes." They note that historian David Labaree calls this the "democratic equality" objective of the common schools movement.
A century after Horace Mann, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would add, "Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education." And decades later, President John F. Kennedy would say, "Only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all." The idea that democracy and public education are inextricably linked is a constant theme of the American experiment. As the eminent education historian Diane Ravitch points out, "Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time." Critical thinking skills among the citizenry are essential to fulfilling the promise of democracy.
The idea of critical thinking as central to enlightenment and individual liberty dates back well before the founding of the United States of America. In Ancient Greece, Plutarch advanced both modern philosophy and education by arguing that true wisdom involves critical thinking and questioning common knowledge rather than just accepting it. He said, "For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth." In his book Politics, Aristotle argued that in order to have an engaged citizenry, "it is manifest that education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public."
The ideas of the Greek philosophers paved the way for John Locke and others-Enlightenment thinkers who influenced our Founding Fathers and argued that a free society was not possible without an educated citizenry. "Universal teaching must precede universal enfranchisement," wrote John Stuart Mill. Because, of course, democracy is more than just picking one candidate or another. Democracy is being deeply, substantively engaged in the problems and solutions of our society. Which means critical thinking and education are absolutely essential to and intertwined with the practice of democracy. When we think critically, we have our own ideas and opinions, but we simultaneously scrutinize them, weighing other facts and ideas to be as rational as possible. We listen to and really wrestle with ideas and opinions that conflict with our own. And we engage earnestly with people who may think differently from us, exchanging facts and opinions, not taunts and smears. Strong critical thinking is the most important muscle in a strong democracy. That's why our Founding Fathers saw fit to establish public education as a central component of our new nation.
The correlation between democracy and education is enduring and profound. Experience and extensive research from around the world strongly suggests that "education is a prerequisite factor that definitely promotes democracy." A 2019 poll across Europe found that from Italy to France to the Czech Republic to Bulgaria, citizens who are more educated are more likely to be satisfied with democracy than those who are less educated. And in the United States, higher levels of education are correlated with higher rates of civic participation.
On the other hand, diminished critical thinking makes voters ripe for the disinformation that helps undermine democracy. Consider the 2024 presidential election in the United States. Yes, many voters in that election had valid reasons to feel angry about their economic plight and were understandably desperate for change. For instance, adjusting for inflation, men in the United States who've completed high school but not college made 22 percent less in 2019 than they did in 1979, forty years earlier. This is downward mobility and it inflicts economic and psychic wounds on individuals, families, and our nation. Plus voters often vote for change in general. From 1969 to 2021, there had been only one instance in which the party that won the presidency maintained control of Congress beyond the following midterm election. In fact, in 2022, when Democrats gained a seat in the Senate two years into Biden's presidency, it defied decades of precedent.
But without a doubt, disinformation and its amplification by the unparalleled right-wing media ecosystem was a significant factor in the outcome of the election. For instance, the violent crime rate in the United States is falling. That's an undeniable fact. But Trump repeatedly said otherwise. "On Joe Biden's watch, violent crime has skyrocketed in virtually every American city," said a Trump campaign press release. Trump, in a speech, said that under the Biden-Harris administration, communities were "plagued by bloodshed, chaos and violent crime." None of this is true. Never mind that the murder rate increased by 30 percent during Trump's first term. But polling showed that voters who believe the false statement that "Violent crime rates are at or near all-time highs in most major American cities" favored Trump over Harris by a 26-point margin. Voters who knew that statement was false preferred Harris by a 65-point margin.
In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) and social media lack guardrails and nonpartisan media and media literacy are declining, it's more important than ever that voters have the tools they need to think critically and discern fact from fiction. As President Joe Biden said in his farewell address from the Oval Office, "Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit."
In her book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, historian Anne Applebaum writes that "people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity." Fascists know this. They not only distract from the truth but cultivate division and discord to present themselves as the simplistic, obvious antidote.
Critical thinking, on the other hand, embraces complexity and nuance-and democracy. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, who studied the conditions under which ordinary Germans were complicit in carrying out the Holocaust, said, "What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed." Totalitarians, Arendt argued, deprive people of their "capacity to think and to judge," and warned that "with such a people you can then do what you please." Destroying critical thinking and destroying democracy go hand in hand. The prominent developmental psychologist Jean Piaget once wrote that the principal "goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discoverers." Piaget continued, "The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered." This could be a recipe for critical thinking in the age of propaganda-laden elections.
When he was still a student at Morehouse College, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an essay in the student newspaper titled "The Purpose of Education." He argued that education has two main purposes: "the one is utility and the other is culture." Education helps students develop concrete skills and tools and learn how to use them to achieve their goals in life. But that second purpose King wrote about? That purpose is really democracy. "To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction."
"The function of education," Dr. King went on, "is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically." Critical thinking is vital to accurately understanding societal problems that need to be solved and, together with our civic peers, engaging, analyzing, and innovating as we constantly renew and reinvent our democracy. Critical thinking is the most important muscle in the exercise of democracy. No wonder fascists want to weaken it.
Why Fascists Hate Critical Thinking
"Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint," writes historian Heather Cox Richardson in her book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Fascist leaders may campaign for our votes, but modern democracies more often fall because of autocratic candidates who work within the system to dismantle it, rather than coups or military takeovers.
"Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same," writes the international democracy-monitoring organization Freedom House, reporting on the trend of "democratic backsliding" worldwide. It was Trump, for instance, who fought endlessly to overturn the results of the 2020 election, still refusing to admit that he lost. And during the 2024 election, Trump said to his supporters that after this election "you're not going to have to vote." He's not the first. Far-right political strategist Paul Weyrich once famously declared, "I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Copyright © 2025 by Randi Weingarten. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
