Randi Weingarten > Quotes

“The fascist playbook is a shell game of fear—taking our real, understandable concerns as Americans but making us look somewhere else, blame someone else, as the cause. Because fascists need enemies to justify their attacks on public education and our democracy and society as a whole.”
― Randi Weingarten, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy

“A group of anti-government, anti-pluralism, anti-opportunity fascists, oligarchs, and far-right activists are demonizing public school teachers so they can divide the American public and destroy public education as we know it. Teachers aren’t being smeared and undermined because they’re doing anything wrong but because they’re doing something very, very right.”
― Randi Weingarten, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy

“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.”
― Randi Weingarten, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy

“Public schools are laboratories of civil society and, at their best, embody the multifaith, multiracial coexistence that is our nation’s best future. That’s why the motto of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—the union that I have had the honor of leading since 2008—is “Democracy in education, education for democracy.” Public schools aren’t 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.”
― Randi Weingarten, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy