What authoritarian movements fear is not simply knowledge but the possibility that ordinary people might come to recognize themselves as makers of history rather than objects of history. The contemporary attack on universities, teachers, libraries, curricula, and public intellectuals is not accidental. Throughout history, authoritarian movements have understood something that liberal democracies often forget: education is never merely about the transmission of knowledge. It is fundamentally a struggle over consciousness itself.

Power fears classrooms because classrooms contain the possibility that people might begin to read the world critically rather than simply adapt to it. Authoritarian projects depend upon naturalizing existing social arrangements. They seek to convince people that hierarchy is inevitable, that inequality is deserved, that nationalism is synonymous with patriotism, and that the present order represents the only realistic future. Critical education disrupts these assumptions. It opens spaces where students can ask dangerous questions: Who benefits from existing arrangements? Whose voices have been excluded from history? Why do certain forms of suffering persist? What alternatives might be possible?

The issue is not simply knowledge but collective knowledge. A solitary individual may question authority in private, but when people gather to analyze their experiences, compare their histories, and imagine alternatives, criticism can become a social force. Authoritarian movements recognize that classrooms, universities, and cultural institutions can function as laboratories of democratic possibility. They are among the few public spaces where people learn to connect personal troubles with larger structures of power and to recognize themselves as historical agents rather than passive spectators.

This is why attacks on education are so often accompanied by efforts to rewrite textbooks, ban books, police language, censor teachers, and manufacture historical amnesia. Whether in the United States, India, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, or elsewhere, the pattern is remarkably familiar. The path toward authoritarian rule is frequently paved by efforts to subordinate education to nationalist mythology, cultural conformity, and ideological loyalty. Such measures are designed not merely to suppress information but to regulate memory itself. Memory is dangerous because it reminds us that societies have changed before and therefore can change again. Historical consciousness undermines the authoritarian fantasy that the existing order is permanent, natural, or sacred.

What right-wing authoritarian projects fear most is not disagreement but the emergence of democratic publics capable of critical reflection. They fear forms of collective thinking that expose the contradictions of power, reveal the humanity of those who have been marginalized, and cultivate the capacity to imagine a world different from the one we have inherited. At its best, education teaches people that reality is not a fate to which we must submit but a field of struggle in which we can intervene.

The deepest threat that critical education poses to authoritarianism is that it transforms people from objects of history into subjects of history. It teaches them that the world they inhabit was made by human beings and can therefore be remade by human beings. Every authoritarian project seeks to close the future by declaring that there is no alternative. Every critical classroom reopens the future by reminding us that history remains unfinished.

For this reason, the classroom remains one of the most important political spaces in society. It is one of the few places where critical dialogue can challenge manufactured ignorance, where hope can confront cynicism, and where people can learn that democracy is not merely a method of governance but a way of living together. Authoritarianism begins by attacking the institutions that teach people how to think. Critical pedagogy begins by helping people discover that the future is still theirs to create.

2. In Life in Schools, you argue that schools often reproduce dominant ideology while presenting themselves as neutral institutions. Today, however, we are witnessing something different: states no longer even pretend to be neutral. They openly demand patriotic education, civilizational pride, and ideological loyalty. Do you think we are witnessing the collapse of liberal neutrality itself?

McLaren: I do not believe we are witnessing the collapse of liberal neutrality because, in important respects, liberal neutrality never truly existed. One of the central arguments I made in Life in Schools was that educational institutions often reproduce dominant social relations while presenting themselves as politically neutral. Schools have always transmitted particular values, identities, histories, and assumptions about the social order. What we are witnessing today is not the collapse of neutrality but the collapse of the need to maintain the fiction of neutrality.

Historically, liberal democracies claimed that schools existed to cultivate informed citizens capable of participating in democratic life. Yet beneath this democratic promise was another function. Education has often been organized less around creating active citizens than around producing compliant subjects—individuals sufficiently adapted to existing institutions that they rarely question who exercises power, whose interests are being served, or how systems of inequality are reproduced. Too often, schools have taught people how to fit into the existing order rather than how to transform it.

Today the mask has been removed. Contemporary authoritarian movements no longer feel compelled to present education as a neutral enterprise. They openly demand patriotic education, civilizational pride, ideological loyalty, and cultural conformity. We see this tendency in different forms across the globe—in the United States, India, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere. While these movements emerge from distinct historical circumstances, they share a common aspiration: to subordinate critical inquiry to nationalist mythology and transform education into an instrument of political allegiance.

The danger is not that schools transmit values. They always have. The danger arises when education ceases to cultivate self-reflection, critical judgment, historical consciousness, and democratic participation. Authoritarian projects seek to replace questioning with obedience, dialogue with dogma, and historical inquiry with official memory. Their objective is not to educate populations but to manage them.

In the United States, this tendency has become increasingly visible. We are witnessing sustained efforts to weaken democratic institutions, restrict access to historical knowledge, demonize critical scholarship, and redefine citizenship in increasingly exclusionary terms. The promise of democracy rests on the belief that citizens possess inalienable rights and meaningful opportunities to participate in shaping their collective future. Authoritarian politics moves in the opposite direction. It seeks to transform citizens into spectators, participants into followers, and democratic institutions into instruments of executive power. The language of freedom remains, but the democratic substance of freedom is steadily eroded.

What is ultimately at stake is the distinction between citizens and subjects. Citizens govern collectively. Subjects are governed by others. Citizens recognize themselves as makers of history. Subjects are taught to accept a history made for them. Critical pedagogy begins with the conviction that human beings are not destined to remain objects of power but possess the capacity to become conscious agents of social transformation.

This is why the struggle over education has become so intense. It is not fundamentally a conflict over textbooks, curricula, classroom practices, or educational standards. It is a struggle over consciousness itself. It is a struggle over memory, identity, agency, and the capacity to imagine futures that depart from the logic of domination. Authoritarian movements understand that if people learn to think critically, to question inherited assumptions, and to connect their personal experiences to wider structures of power, they become more difficult to govern through fear, myth, and manufactured ignorance.

At a moment when militarism, economic precarity, ecological devastation, and resurgent nationalism threaten the future of humanity, education must become more than a mechanism for workforce preparation or patriotic socialization. It must become a practice of democratic possibility. Nations cannot survive indefinitely through competition, permanent war, and the cultivation of enemies. They must learn the difficult art of peaceful coexistence. Education has a crucial role to play in that task. It must help create citizens capable of dialogue across differences, capable of recognizing their shared humanity, and capable of building institutions grounded in justice rather than domination.

The central question facing us today is therefore not whether schools should transmit values. They always will. The real question is this: Will education prepare people to participate critically in democratic life, or will it train them to accept increasingly authoritarian forms of rule? The answer to that question will shape not only the future of education but the future of democracy itself.

3. Many right-wing movements speak obsessively about protecting children — from books, from gender, from sexuality, from ‘anti-national’ ideas, from critical race theory, from dissent. Why do authoritarian movements so often construct the child as a site of moral panic? What does the political struggle over the imagination of the child reveal about the future a regime wants to produce?

McLaren: The child has always occupied a sacred place in the political imagination. The child is tomorrow’s citizen, tomorrow’s worker, tomorrow’s believer, tomorrow’s dissenter. The child embodies the future in its most vulnerable and unfinished form. For that reason, every struggle over the child is ultimately a struggle over history itself.

Authoritarian movements understand this intuitively. They know that whoever shapes the imagination of the young shapes the horizon of what a society believes is possible. They know that power does not endure through force alone. It must reproduce itself in memory, in desire, in common sense, and in the stories a nation tells about itself. The child therefore becomes both symbol and battleground—a contested territory upon which competing visions of the future wage war.

This is why authoritarian movements so often speak in the language of protection. Children must be protected from dangerous books, dangerous ideas, dangerous histories, dangerous questions. The rhetoric changes according to time and place, but the structure remains remarkably constant. The supposed threat may be socialism, feminism, critical race theory, secularism, gender diversity, religious pluralism, anti-colonial thought, or “anti-national” ideas. The enemy’s name changes. The political function remains the same.

What is presented as protection is often a fear of freedom.

The deepest anxiety of authoritarian movements is not that children will be corrupted by knowledge. It is that they will discover their own capacity to think. They fear the moment when a young person realizes that the world they have inherited is not inevitable. They fear the recognition that institutions are human creations rather than divine decrees, that history contains struggles rather than destinies, and that power can be questioned rather than merely obeyed.

The child who learns to ask “Why?” becomes infinitely more dangerous to authoritarianism than the child who merely learns to repeat.

For decades I have witnessed this process firsthand. Because my work has engaged Marx’s critique of capitalism and because I have argued that education should cultivate critical consciousness rather than passive conformity, I have often found myself the target of campaigns of distortion and denunciation. The attacks themselves are less important than what they reveal. Rarely do they engage the actual substance of critical pedagogy. Instead, they manufacture a fantasy in which educators become sinister manipulators, classrooms become laboratories of indoctrination, and democratic dialogue becomes evidence of ideological conspiracy.

There is a profound irony here. Critical pedagogy, following Paulo Freire, begins with a rejection of indoctrination. Freire’s vision of education was rooted in dialogue, humility, and the unfinished character of human knowledge. He believed that students should become subjects of history rather than objects molded by authority. Yet those who seek unquestioning loyalty frequently portray the cultivation of critical thought as itself a form of coercion.

The inversion is revealing.

When power fears questions, it must portray questioning as a threat.

When power fears dialogue, it must portray dialogue as subversion.

When power fears freedom, it must portray freedom as danger.

What we are witnessing across many parts of the world today is not merely a disagreement about curriculum. It is a struggle over consciousness itself.

In the United States, attacks on critical race theory, diversity initiatives, and public education have often been accompanied by the rise of Christian nationalist movements that seek to fuse religious identity with state power. As a Catholic deeply influenced by liberation theology and committed to ecumenical dialogue, I find this development particularly troubling. Liberation theology taught many of us that faith is not an escape from history but an encounter with it. It insists that the Gospel speaks not only to personal salvation but also to questions of justice, poverty, exclusion, and human dignity. It asks believers to stand with the oppressed rather than sanctify the powerful.

For authoritarian movements, such a vision is deeply unsettling.

The authoritarian imagination prefers certainty to conscience. It prefers obedience to solidarity. It prefers a God enlisted in the service of empire to a God who disturbs the tranquility of privilege.

This is why authoritarian politics so often seeks to regulate memory. It knows that memory is dangerous. A people who remember slavery, colonialism, caste oppression, racism, patriarchy, genocide, exploitation, and resistance are less easily persuaded that existing arrangements are natural. History becomes a threat because history reveals contingency. It reminds us that every empire once appeared permanent and every system of domination once claimed inevitability.

Books become dangerous because they expand the boundaries of imagination.

Teachers become dangerous because they encourage questions.

Universities become dangerous because they cultivate criticism.

And children become dangerous because they represent possibilities not yet colonized.

Paulo Freire understood this with extraordinary clarity. His concept of conscientização — critical consciousness — was not simply a pedagogical method. It was an affirmation of human vocation itself. To become critically conscious is to learn to read both the word and the world. It is to perceive the social forces that shape our lives and to recognize ourselves as participants in history rather than spectators standing helplessly at its edge.

Authoritarian movements understand this lesson as well, though they draw the opposite conclusion. If critical consciousness can liberate, then consciousness itself must be controlled. If education can expand democratic possibilities, then education must be disciplined. If imagination can produce new futures, then imagination must be enclosed within the boundaries of acceptable thought.

This pattern can be observed across the globe. Whether the language is anti-wokeism, anti-nationalism, cultural purity, religious orthodoxy, or civilizational renewal, the objective is often similar: to narrow the range of questions that can be asked and the range of futures that can be imagined.

The child becomes the vessel into which these anxieties are poured.

Yet the political struggle over the child reveals something even deeper. It reveals the kind of society a regime hopes to create.

Democratic societies imagine children as future citizens capable of judgment, creativity, compassion, and dissent. They understand that democracy depends upon people who can think critically, deliberate collectively, and challenge injustice.

Authoritarian societies imagine children differently. They imagine them primarily as inheritors of unquestioned traditions, guardians of official truths, and carriers of approved identities. Their educational ideal is not the questioning citizen but the obedient subject.

The difference between these visions is ultimately the difference between freedom and domination.

The crucial question, therefore, is not whether children should be protected. Of course they should. The real question is what we are protecting within them.

Are we protecting their capacity to wonder?

Their capacity to question?

Their capacity to empathize with those unlike themselves?

Their capacity to imagine a world that does not yet exist?

Or are we protecting them from these very capacities because they threaten established arrangements of power?

The answer tells us much about the future being constructed in the present.

When governments, religious movements, media empires, and political organizations seek to control what children may read, discuss, remember, or imagine, they are engaged in more than a cultural dispute. They are attempting to colonize the future itself.

For the future is first born in the imagination.

And every authoritarian project understands a truth that educators have long known: before one can govern a society, one must first govern the stories its children are permitted to tell about themselves and about the world.

Yet this is also why educators continue to teach, why parents continue to tell stories of justice, and why social movements continue to struggle for democratic futures. Authoritarianism is powerful, but it remains haunted by a limitation it cannot overcome: it cannot fully extinguish the human capacity to hope, to imagine, and to dream beyond the world as it is.

Paulo Freire often reminded us that history is a field of possibility rather than destiny. Human beings are unfinished creatures living in an unfinished world. Education, at its best, helps us recognize that unfinishedness not as a deficiency but as a condition of freedom. It invites young people to understand that society is not a fixed inheritance but an ongoing project shaped by human choices, human struggles, and human acts of solidarity.

For this reason, the struggle over the child is ultimately a struggle over hope itself. It is a struggle over whether future generations will inherit a culture of questioning or a culture of obedience, a democracy sustained by critical citizens or a society organized around fear and conformity. The most important question is not whether children will inherit the future. They inevitably will. The question is whether they will inherit the intellectual and moral courage necessary to transform it.

Every child who learns to ask why, who learns to listen to the suffering of others, who learns to imagine a more just and compassionate world, carries within them a possibility that no authoritarian project can fully contain. That possibility is the beginning of democratic life itself. It is the fragile but enduring conviction that history remains open, that justice remains worth struggling for, and that another world remains possible.

For whenever a child opens a forbidden book, asks an inconvenient question, or imagines a more just society, history begins again. And that possibility — more than any textbook, theory, or curriculum — is what authoritarianism fears most.