When Educators Confront Authoritarianism
Our guest authors are Adam Fefer, senior researcher at the Horizons Project and a political scientist; and Maria Stephan, co-Leader of the Horizons Project, a member of the Freedom Trainers, and an award-winning author and organizer.
How Educators Strengthen Democracy
Educators are critical to the maintenance of democratic institutions, norms, and freedoms. They provide students with knowledge (e.g., of history and the constitution), skills (critical thinking and media literacy), values (tolerance and civic virtue), and dispositions (to actively participate and deliberate in civic life). Public educators have the great advantage of being embedded in and frequently interacting with their communities, and are typically seen as trustworthy. Public schools are one of the most common places for voting to occur. Apart from educators generally, educators’ unions can strengthen democracy, for example because union members are more likely to vote. When labor unions and professional organizations push for democratic change, these movements tend to have much higher rates of success and long-term sustainability.
Democracy is not only strengthened by educators, but academic freedom is itself a component of democracy. Indeed, a free society is incompatible with heavy-handed restrictions on what can be taught, researched, and disseminated, as well as with state control and surveillance of schools and universities. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project contains more than 10 indices that seek to measure academic freedom across time and place. One example is the “Freedom of academic and cultural expression” index, a scale between 0 (freedoms not respected) and 4 (fully respected). This index documents the following recent declines in the US: from 3.2 to 3.0 between 2016-17, an increase to 3.3 in 2021, then a decline to 2.4 in 2023 and 2.1 in 2024. These coincide with declines on similar indices, like the “Freedom to research and teach” index, as well as with much steeper declines in places as diverse as Brazil, Hungary, and Indonesia.