Teaching in 1930s Germany
From low-pay, to ballooning class sizes, to state leaders' "contempt" for the teaching profession, a look at education under the definitive authoritarian regime--and what it means today.
These days, I’ve been pushing Democrats to talk more about improving public schools in ways that families can feel connected to directly. It’s important both for educational outcomes in their own right, and to reclaim the political advantage on the issue, that supporters of public schools push for investments that parents feel matter in the few short years they have with their children at home.
Sometimes that means talking about results, academic excellence, and access to specific programs or services—and dialing back a bit on bigger picture arguments like how public schools fit into democracy or self-government, as many public school advocates understandably like to do.
But democracy and making schools work for all kids and families are really both/and conversations. Sometimes we need to pause and remember what else is at stake beyond specific policy debates.
And that’s where history can help.
“Dangerous” Teachers?
Earlier this week, I hosted Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, for a conversation about her new book Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy.
I’ve gotten to know Randi pretty well over the past few years, as we’ve shared stages together all over the country talking about threats to public education. She’s unfortunately one of the MAGA Right’s favorite targets—former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo once called her the “most dangerous person in the world.”
Now you may think that of course Trump-world hates the leader of the nation’s second largest teachers’ union. And you may think that when that union leader writes a book, published 9 months into Trump’s second term, calling out fascists who “fear teachers,” she’s just taking a political shot back at far-Right efforts to demonize and dehumanize her.
I’ve warned that the GOP—and the MAGA Right in particular—are obsessed with schools. And I’ve warned that Democrats better get their act together talking about educational excellence or they’ll lose education to the Right as an issue altogether.
But we need to take seriously the fact that the Trump Administration sees teachers as one of “the most dangerous” threats to its goals of remaking this country. My most recent newsletter looked at the Justice Department’s efforts to target local school teaching content, for example.
And just in case you think Randi—or I—are overstating where teachers, and schools, fall into far-Right ideology, I want to turn to a neutral, third-party look at history. To do so I opened the book The Third Reich in Power, by the historian Richard J. Evans. It’s a fascinating, frightening account of the middle years between Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the Second World War. It documents the everyday life, the economic agenda, and the kind of normally mundane matters of state and local government we’ve taken for granted in the United States.
“Central Directives”
In two chapters nestled in the middle of his book, Evans recounts how the Nazis focused both on curriculum and content, and on the teaching profession itself. The “National Socialist Teachers League” was a political group that teachers could join to attest to their loyalty and their commitment to teaching Nazi principles in the classroom:
Teachers knew within a few months of the Nazi seizure of power the basic outcomes of what they had to teach. A directive issued in January 1934 made it compulsory for schools to educate their pupils ‘in the spirit of National Socialism’ (264).
And:
“A steady stream of directives flowed from the education authorities in the regions, while additional teaching materials were issued by Nazi teachers’ organizations in different parts of the country (263).”
Meanwhile, “really open dissent in the schools had become virtually impossible long before the eve of the war (266).”
Crucially, this was all coordinated by the central government authorities, who quickly displaced local governments in regulating content, even as regional managers maintained some superficial control:
From 1935 onwards, regional initiatives were augmented by central directives covering the teaching of a whole variety of different subjects in different years. By 1938, these directives covered every school year and most subjects, even those without any directly ideological content (265).
This created a culture of fear in local schools and classrooms, with teachers worried they’d be reported even for one-offs and asides during the workday:
The pressures on teachers to follow the Nazi line were not just exerted from above. An incautious word in class could result in a teacher being arrested. On one occasion, a 38-year-old teacher…told a joke to her class [and] one of them…told his parents, who promptly informed the Gestapo. Not only the teacher, who denied any intention of insulting the state, but also five of the children were interrogated (268).
I’ll simply note this here: just six days ago, new reporting indicated that more than 600 people have been fired so far for comments made during the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Efforts to reign in “DEI” and “CRT” teaching in the name of preventing “reverse discrimination” abound across much of the United States, and Moms for Liberty—the right-wing group flagged as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, once issued a $500 “bounty” on any teachers shown to be teaching such “divisive concepts.”
“Continuing pressure by the government to keep teacher pay down in order to make money available for other aspects of state expenditure…added to the deterrent effect.”
—Richard J. Evans
A Demoralized, Underpaid Workforce
It’s probably unsurprising to most of you that the Nazis wanted to indoctrinate students through restricting what teachers could teach and say. But what’s really important to know is that Nazi leaders accomplished this not just through threats and censorship, but by direct attacks on the profession and the teacher labor market itself.
Richard Evans explains:
Teachers had to endure a barrage of criticism from adult Nazi activists at every level, starting with Hitler himself, and going on to what one group of teachers called ‘a tone of contempt for the teaching profession’ (269).
And this “contempt” translated into lower salaries—school investments sent elsewhere in the Third Reich’s budget—and teacher shortages:
Continuing pressure by the government to keep pay down in order to make money available for other aspects of state expenditure…added to the deterrent effect. In small village schools, teachers found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet…Increasing numbers of teaches took early retirement or left the profession for other jobs (269).
Class sizes, already high, skyrocketed:
The result was that by 1938, class sizes on average in all schools had increased to 43 pupils per teacher as compared to 37 in 1927, while less than one-fourteenth of all secondary teachers were now under the age of forty (269).
Under this weight of both hostility and neglect, the entire system of training, hiring, and retaining teachers fell apart. As one observer wrote in 1934:
Everything that has been built up over a century of work by the teaching profession is no longer there in essence. Only the outer shell is still standing; the school houses and the teachers and the pupils are still there, but the spirit and the inner organization has gone. They have been willfully destroyed from above (270).
Although claiming to foster only the most rigorous intellects and talents, the Nazis let schools deteriorate to the point of academic decay:
Children still learned the three Rs and in grammar schools and other parts of the secondary education system…but there can be little doubt that the quality of education was steadily declining. By 1939, employers were complaining that school graduates’ standards of knowing knowledge of language and arithmetic were poor…Educational standards had declined markedly (289-90).
There is no shortage, in 2026, of employers complaining that American students “aren’t ready to work” due to falling educational standards and “failing” public schools.
“Winning Over the Young”
The central chapter on education in Richard Evans’s book is titled “Winning Over the Young.” And apart from documenting the attacks on teachers and the teaching profession, it also contains extended consideration of the Hitler Youth and the cultivation of chauvinist, performative displays of masculinity and physical prowess in schools that the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has identified in authoritarian regimes more broadly.
I’ve written before that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, before joining the Trump Administration, had a longstanding obsession with schools. He even co-wrote a book on the topic, Battle for the American Mind, on the eve of his appointment to the cabinet. The combination of Hegseth’s interest in overt, almost comical displays of masculinity and physical prowess, along with a focus on youth and education, is not without parallel.
Of Germany’s education system in the 1930s, Richard Evans writes:
Central themes in the new teaching included courage in battle, sacrifice for a greater cause, boundless admiration for the Leader, and hatred of Germany’s enemies (263)
The new emphasis of the regime on physical education and military discipline played into the hands of traditionalist disciplinarians…the military spirit began to permeate the educational system (268).
At every level, formal learning was given decreased emphasis as the hours devoted to physical education and sport in the state schools was increased (289).
We need to call out every parallel and reminder we see of a past we must not ever repeat.
The What and the Why
I’m going to be honest. I’ve mostly stayed away from direct parallels between the current threat environment in the United States and Hitler’s Germany and other fascist regimes. And I’ve done so mostly because, to the extent that I have any professional expertise in history, that expertise lies in the U.S. South—especially, but not limited to, southern educational history.
There is plenty to see in the Trump regime’s activity that has direct echos in the American past, especially in the South, so I’ve mostly left crossing the ocean to other specialists. I’m also a public policy professional, working in the middle of ongoing debates and decisions about current public policy. And that takes enough time on its own.
But it’s directly through that expertise that I see such clear, stark parallels to the teaching profession and threats to education in the past. Low teacher morale, contempt for the teaching profession, shortages driven by low pay and job insecurity, and an overriding attention to surveillance of classroom content—each of these are features of the labor market for teachers in the United States today.
And each of them were features of the teacher labor market in 1930s Germany.
There is something else that prompted this newsletter. Earlier this week, I heard a podcast from The Bulwark in which Tim Miller and Jonathan V. Last described a secret network of doulas, first mentioned by Governor Tim Walz, that is going around helping women give birth at home in secret due to fears of ICE.
And I thought: if that simply horrific reality is happening in Minnesota, with very clear echoes to what we thought was a bygone era in another country, maybe we need to call out every other parallel and reminder we see of a past we must not ever repeat.
When it comes to education, should the voice of that past be called out in every policy debate or political strategy session concerning educational excellence? Not necessarily. In my line of work, we all have a job to do, and that’s crafting the right solutions for kids and families today, in 2026.
But while we need to be laser-focused on improving public schools as part of defending public schools, we also need to hold dearly close why we need to defend public schools in the first place.
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Catch up on recent conversations with
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, candidate for governor
Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, representing Washington’s 3rd District
Texas State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, candidate for governor
Kansas State Senator Cindy Holscher, candidate for governor
Ohio Lt. Governor candidate David Pepper
Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, candidate for Illinois’s 9th Congressional District
MN State Rep. Kaela Berg, candidate for Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District
Bob Brooks, candidate for Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District
Rebecca Cooke, candidate for Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District
Christina Hines, candidate for Michigan’s 10th Congressional District
Fred Wellman, candidate for Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District
AFT President Randi Weingarten
Author and Historian Diane Ravitch
Dr. Jill Underly, Wisconsin statewide school superintendent (elected)
VIDEO:
With Jessica Calarco, author of Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net
With Katherine Stewart, author of Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
With Jason Zengerle, author of Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind