Reflections on Teach Truth Day of Action 2025

‍In June 2025, Zinn Education Project hosted their 5th annual Teach Truth Day of Action, which organizers in Iowa City have participated in since 2022. Human Restoration Project has been a co-sponsor of the national Teach Truth Day of Action and the local Iowa City event. These are spoken remarks from the author edited for publication. Photos are also from the author documenting the Iowa City Teach Truth Day of Action event held in Chauncey Swan Park on June 14, 2025.

My name is Nick Covington, I taught high school social studies for ten years at Ankeny High School before leaving in 2022 after being told “Current Events Do Not Belong in History Class.” I’m a co-founder of Human Restoration Project, an Iowa-based progressive education non-profit and co-sponsor of the national Teach Truth Day of Action.

Sometimes resistance looks like taking care of yourself and those around you. Shout out to every caregiver building a better world one child at a time. Shout out to everyone trying to make ends meet, balancing the needs of their families with the urgency of this moment and couldn’t be here today. In a system intended to grind you down, sometimes resistance looks like survival. 

The other day my friend, Greg Wickencamp, mentioned the tradition of teach-ins and community education that have played an important role in protest movements in the past. If you’ll allow me, it’s my goal to have us participate in that tradition this afternoon and let me wear my old history teacher hat for a moment. If you’ll tolerate me.

John Dewey was one of the most influential philosophers and educators in American history. He’s not the Dewey Decimal System, that’s a different guy. If you’ve ever heard of progressive education or the idea of “learning by doing” –“Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” – That’s John Dewey.

John Dewey also wrote the book on Democracy and Education, literally, that’s the title. It came out in 1916. And for Dewey that meant not just passing a test and knowing the three branches of government, but modeling classrooms and schools as laboratories for participatory democracy. Something I think we’ve lost sight of as a purpose of education, and I think it shows.

“A democracy is more than a form of government,” he wrote, “it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”

How often do we experience that today? How is our society structured to support associated living and conjoint communicated experience? And if we don’t experience that, and society isn’t structured to support it, how can we say that we live in a democratic society?

I’ll come back to that. 

John Dewey lived a remarkable life at a profoundly volatile time in the history of the United States and the world. As a young boy his father was a Union cavalry volunteer in the Civil War, and Dewey himself became a well-regarded philosopher even before the outbreak of World War I, teaching at the Universities of Michigan, Minnesota, and Chicago, before joining the faculty at Columbia Teachers College in New York. He remained prolific throughout what is known to us now as the “interwar period” when the global order was at its most fragile. As a new generation of fascist, imperialist, and totalitarian ideologies drove the world once again to war, Dewey wrote his most impassioned defenses of liberal democracy and the role of education as a bulwark against fascism and totalitarianism. 

Dewey knew that participatory democracy extends beyond campaigns and elections to everyday practices, cultural norms, and institutions like schools and workplaces that empower people to shape their collective lives. Any definition of healthy modern democracy today must then also include workplace democracy; social movements rooted in free speech, independent and critical media; protests like this and those happening across the country this week; and a thriving democratic education.

As Americans, we have an intuitive understanding of power as we experience it in the context of government, the workplace, and schooling – we know who’s the boss, who won the election, and who can take points off for late work – but despite making democracy our national identity, most Americans don’t meaningfully participate in civic, economic, or social democratic practices, and it’s ruining our lives.

First, most Americans are governed by officials they did not elect and do not influence. 

If you were to ask the average American what democracy meant, they'd probably respond with one word.

But if voting were the sole condition of a healthy democracy, our condition would be critical. Typical voter turnout for national elections is below 50% and drops to 5-10% for local school board elections, and our highly polarized, winner-take-all two-party system turns half of those participants into losers. One result is that 85% of Americans say that elected officials “don’t care what people like me think” and just 4% believe the political system is working very well today.

So maybe we can look for examples of democratic practice where people spend most of their adult lives: at work.

Americans have virtually no access to democracy in the workplace. 

In just my lifetime, rates of union membership have declined from representing 1 in 5 workers to just 1 in 10. Meanwhile, wealth inequality in America has only gotten worse. The top 10% of households hold 67% of total household wealth, while the bottom 50% hold just 2. Healthcare access in America is also tied to employment like no other peer nation, making job loss an existential threat to financial, mental, and physical health. 

But perhaps these trends begin even earlier, where American students spend nearly 9,000 hours in school over the course of their K-12 education. So how do schools and teachers model American democratic practices for children and young adults?

Americans do not make democratic decisions at or about school. 

(And no, “school choice” schemes that funnel public funds into private schools are not a legitimate vehicle for democracy) 

In the classroom, the language of workplace hierarchies and efficiency is everywhere. Teachers are urged to teach from bell to bell; teachers are held accountable to student outcomes to ensure that no instructional minutes have been wasted; and students are instructed to do their work for teachers or risk falling behind (behind what, exactly?).

Additional blows to schooling as democratic practice been made in several states, including ours, which have lined up to pass unpopular laws limiting collective bargaining rights of teachers and their unions while at the same time calling for statewide book bans in schools and libraries, prohibiting the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts” about race and gender, and banning Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives at public universities. 

When “workforce development” and “college and career readiness” become the organizing principle of schooling and education – when we see the negative consequences for individual and collective health, stability, and liberty – and when these ideas pervade government, work, and school, we are right to be suspicious of aligning the ends and means of education with what “the market” wants.

The result of this decades-long project to deprofessionalize the teacher workforce, diminish pubic investment in K-12 and higher education, and align outcomes with workforce development has meant that teachers still make less money compared to their similarly educated peers, standardized test scores have remained largely flat or declining, and children’s mental health has reached a National State of Emergency. 

I hear you saying, that’s a lot of bad news and I’ve got enough of that going on, so what’s the alternative?

The year was 1937 and the machinery turning the world to war was running once again. 

Few people in 1937 could imagine what the next decade held for them: the deadliest military conflict in history, a Holocaust, and two atomic bombs later. That same year, John Dewey and a colleague co-authored an essay titled, The Forward View: A Free Teacher in a Free Society, in which they laid out a uniquely American vision of social cooperation and thriving democratic practice with teachers, students and schools as its living, beating heart.

And it is my privilege to bring this vision, and this warning, from nearly 100 years ago at the precipice of an era we now recognize as among the darkest in human history:

‍“…Americans, when they look at some of the totalitarian states [around the world], prize highly the greater freedom of this country, but in spite of this, violations of civil liberties and assaults upon educational freedom seem to be increasing…

‍We have seen how classroom methods, teacher attitudes, community activities, school administration, and teacher organizations can play a part in the struggle to advance the democratic ideal in defiance of any threat of fascism. But there can be no certainty of victory.

‍We remember that fifteen years ago there was only one fascist government, while today there are ten or more.

‍…The teacher must be deeply and passionately concerned with this great historic choice.

And the years immediately ahead will be characterized by struggle. 

It will require struggle to find the essential facts about the present waste of human, natural, and mechanical resources. 

It will require struggle to teach the facts about unrealized human potential and possible abundance for living. 

It will require struggle to secure the necessary freedom to think about the meaning of these facts. 

The most bitter struggles will come when teachers begin to act in the light of these essential facts and meanings.

History indicates that usually in the past when rulers felt their power and privilege slipping away, they attempted by violence to stop the process and to reestablish their rulership. 

If there be any teachers who chose this profession because they imagined that in it they might stand securely aside from the turmoil of battle for power, they will probably find the next decade or several decades very dismaying…

A free education is incompatible with fascism. 

Education is likely to be one of the great battlegrounds upon which is waged an intense and desperate struggle for power.

What we do today in revising a curriculum, studying psychology, preparing a lesson, educating a teacher, addressing a group of parents, or passing a resolution in our organization of teachers will take us a little nearer to, or remove us farther from, the practices which have here been envisioned for a free teacher in a free society. 

What teachers do as citizens in supporting or failing to support the movements which endeavor to protect or to extend democracy may also contribute…to the realization of a better society and a better education. Teachers may, however, play a more understanding and more enthusiastic part in the contemporary social struggle if they appreciate the kind of education which may result from the victory of democracy.

When a society enters upon socioeconomic planning by democratic and cooperative methods, that society will not have solved its problems but will, in a larger measure than today, have provided its teachers and other citizens with the necessary social machinery for creative action…

Our democratic ideals require that the people of that society shall, so far as possible, understand and will the developments which take place.

The work of the teacher remains thus, forever, a frontier task. Always the teacher must deal with life at its point of becoming. What has been and what is are the raw materials out of which students and teachers must create what is to be. Teaching will continue to be an adventure on the social frontier, where each new generation presses its advance toward an ever-growing American dream.” 

A free education is incompatible with fascism. That was Dewey and Watson’s petition from their generation’s age of fascism to our own: that to make education incompatible with fascism is to make us more free. 

A free education is necessarily democratic, public, and pluralistic – everyone is welcome, regardless of race, religion, gender identity, disability, or documentation. 

And this is the power of a democratic, public, and pluralistic education: When we see immigrants, gay and trans people, Indigenous, Black and Brown people, disabled people as our classmates and colleagues, students and playmates, neighbors and friends, we become inoculated against the dehumanizing rhetoric and violence racial authoritarianism and fascism demands.  

Which is exactly why in the fascist mind, public schooling and the public sphere are viewed as a threat to be subverted, conquered, and destroyed, and why democratic, public, pluralistic education is vital to free people in a free and democratic country. 

“Our democratic ideals require that the people of that society shall understand and WILL the developments which take place,” they wrote. 

So we have a choice, don’t we? 

To create a free and democratic country we must understand and WILL the development of a democratic education that is incompatible with fascism.  Just as today’s fascists are actively creating conditions more favorable to an exclusive, vicious, violent, oligarchic, and autocratic society, we must work harder than them to create conditions that cultivate inclusion, empathy, discourse, equality, and democracy. 

We must make it so. 

If you are or have ever been a teacher. Those conditions begin in your classroom. Do the practices and curriculum of your classroom move us nearer to or remove us further away from a free society and democracy as “mode of associated living and conjoint communicated experience”?

If you have any teachers in your family. Teachers’ working conditions are student learning conditions. Do the policies you advocate for support real public, pluralistic democratic ideals in schools and society or do they create the conditions for exclusion, inequality, and viciousness for fascism to coagulate around?

And anyone who has ever been taught by a teacher – this is about all of us now. How will we transform this energy into a commitment to action in solidarity with all Americans teaching truth and resisting institutions of fascism and authoritarianism in this country?

The answer to all of this is not the abandonment of democracy for autocracy and oligarchy, but to double-down on American democracy as our best idea and suffuse democratic practice throughout our civic, economic, social, and educational institutions. What is it about the world that is worth preparing students for, and are we willing to build that better world alongside them?

“A free education is incompatible with fascism. Education is likely to be one of the great battlegrounds upon which is waged an intense and desperate struggle for power.” 

And it’s a privilege to contribute to that struggle for power and a free, public, pluralistic, and democratic education with you all today. Thank you.