Teaching in a Season of Fascism
In a season where cruelty is becoming policy, the work teachers do isn’t loud or glamorous — but it may be the most important resistance left.
The machinery of tyranny is vast, but it cannot erase the smallest act of refusal.
ICE — invited by our State Representatives — came to my area recently with all their usual bluster, LARPing, and posturing.
Suddenly, it wasn’t a headline or “somewhere else.” Kids stayed home. Teachers got a bizarre “See Something, Say Something” style email letting us know we might need to report if armed men tried to enter the building.
That’s when the weight hit. Not the political weight — the human one. The realization that masked men with guns might intersect with my workday as a chemistry teacher.
And then, of course, the chorus: “This is how we find out who you would’ve been in 1938 Germany.” As if memes or influencers can diagnose moral courage.
With all due respect to the clickbaiters, the truth is more complicated — and more ordinary.
Where We Actually Are
My district has been so buried under the aftershocks of financial incompetence that the thought of ICE raids felt distant. But the country’s slow drift toward authoritarianism isn’t hypothetical anymore — it’s local.
We’re a blue island in a red state. We’ve dodged the worst of book bans and surveillance hysteria. Our parents, perhaps distracted by the district’s budget disaster, have supported teachers more than many around the country.
But authoritarian reality arrived anyway.
Our State Representatives invited ICE — the same ones who rigged election maps as a favor for the President, and still haven’t passed a state budget for this year. And they’re publicly asking ICE to come back to the state.
I know — it sounds dramatic.
Until it isn’t.
Authoritarianism doesn’t begin with jackboots.
It begins with the normalization of the outrageous.
Authoritarians don’t seize power — they wait for people to stop noticing it slipping.
So What Do Teachers Do?
There was a moment — I’ll admit this — when I imagined the dramatic version. Hear the boots, gather the vulnerable kids, and usher them out the back like the von Trapps. The fantasy feels good until the reality sets in: life is not a musical.
Then came the guilt. I’ve never been to a protest. Crowds drain me. I don’t want to end up in drone footage or a Stingray sweep. A part of me has always felt ashamed of that.
But slowly, a clearer truth formed:
My job is not to fight the storm.
My job is to keep the lighthouse lit.
Teachers don’t get to be soldiers. We don’t have that luxury. Our battlefield is smaller, steadier, and more important.
Our task is continuity.
Continuity is its own defiance.
To show students, day after day, that decency isn’t extinct. To model adults who choose compassion, not cruelty. To create a small, steady pocket of humanity when the world outside forgets how to act human. We are the thread connecting the past to the present to the future.
We’re not neutral. We’re not disengaged. We’re not pretending things are fine.
We’re preserving the habits that authoritarianism erodes first. Oppression thrives when people forget how to be human. Every act of humanity is a breach in its armor.
That is the resistance.
Every regime fears the places where memory is kept alive.
The Parallel Track
Revolutions need fighters, but they also need caretakers. One wins the day, the other saves the world that follows.
Some people will confront this moment directly: march, sue, organize, expose.
Thank God for them.
Teachers walk a different track.
We’re here so that when the season of fascism breaks — when the country remembers itself — something is still alive to return to:
Schools that still function.
Kids who still trust.
A generation that still knows what compassion feels like.
We’re custodians of the future’s emotional memory — the quiet ones who keep the light steady while everything flickers.
For a long time, I felt small. Guilty. Like my classroom was too tiny compared to the size of the problems outside it.
But maybe the smallness was always the point.
Authoritarianism grows by scale. Humanity survives by intimacy.
Maybe survival at the human scale is what keeps the larger scale from collapsing entirely.
And teaching has never been neutral. Every day we choose fairness over fear.
Thinking over following. Accuracy over propaganda. Kindness over cruelty.
That is moral labor. Not partisan labor.
And it matters.
So What Do We Do?
We’re already doing it.
Holding the line
Keeping kids grounded
Preserving the last scraps of trust in adulthood
Showing students that ICE raids and book bans are choices, not fate
Keeping curiosity alive in a culture obsessed with conformity
Giving kids a future they can still imagine themselves inside
We are doing two jobs: teaching content and counteracting the normalization of cruelty.
We are the ones saying quietly:
“This is wrong. You’re safe here. And this is not forever.”
When this storm passes — and it will — kids will need a place that still feels sane.
That place is us.
The Lights Are Still On
I don’t know how long this season lasts or where the country goes next.
But I do know this:
Tomorrow, the school day begins. Students walk in. I say good morning, and I teach chemistry. And I treat them with dignity in a moment when dignity is scarce — because scarcity makes it more necessary, not less.
I push them hard to think, then push them harder to think for themselves, and not give into the groupthink, the propaganda, the soundbites.
From the outside, it may not look like resistance.
Power fears what it cannot control, and it cannot control the quiet integrity of a single human being doing the next right thing.
No, this may not look like movie-style resistance, but inside the life of a child, it is.
When this season ends, some young people will have made it through for one reason:
their teachers kept the light on.
We go on. We must continue. Our job is to be here.
For Those Who Want One Last Word
There’s a piece of writing tucked inside a fictional universe, but truer than most things said on cable news — and it kept circling my mind as I finished this:
Nemik’s Manifesto.
Its clarity about the slow creep of authoritarianism, and the small human refusals that stop it, feels made for this moment. If you want a companion to this, or a reminder of why the small acts matter, listen: