Teaching Under Capitalism
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The Fight Over Ethnic Studies Is a Fight Over Power
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”
With those words, Marx and Engels identified something every teacher should understand: the class that controls society’s material resources also possesses enormous power over how society explains itself. Its rule is maintained not only through ownership, government, courts, police, and military force, but through control over the production and circulation of ideas. The ruling class presents its own interests as common sense, its own history as the history of everyone, and its own political assumptions as neutral truth.
This is why the fight over ethnic studies has never really been a disagreement about reading lists, lesson plans, or vocabulary. Curriculum is merely the ground on which the struggle becomes visible. Beneath it lies a much larger question: Who has the power to determine what the next generation understands about the world?
Ethnic studies enters that conflict because it challenges the ruling class’s preferred version of history. It restores the experiences of people who have too often appeared in conventional textbooks only as laborers, victims, migrants, troublemakers, or footnotes. It examines how wealth was accumulated, how land was taken, how labor was exploited, and how oppressed people resisted. It allows students to see that inequality did not simply fall from the sky one unfortunate afternoon. It was produced historically through slavery, colonialism, dispossession, imperialism, racial hierarchy, and class rule.
That is precisely what makes ethnic studies dangerous to those who benefit from the social order it examines.
History Is Not Neutral Territory
The conventional history curriculum frequently presents the past as a sequence of presidents, wars, laws, elections, and celebrated individuals. Workers appear occasionally, usually when they strike, riot, immigrate, or die. Their labor builds the country, but their experiences rarely organize the story. Their victories are presented as gifts from enlightened leaders. Their defeats disappear. Their revolutionary possibilities are buried so deeply that an archaeologist would need a union card and a shovel to locate them.
This is not accidental. History written from above makes the existing order appear natural. Capitalism becomes the inevitable result of human progress. Colonial expansion becomes exploration. Empire becomes foreign policy. Strikes become disruptions. Police violence becomes unfortunate excess. Poverty becomes an individual failure. The ruling class disappears as a class and reappears as a collection of successful people who apparently accumulated wealth through superior time management.
Ethnic studies challenges this mythology by beginning from the lives of people who experienced history from below. It asks how Indigenous people understood colonization, how enslaved people understood democracy, how workers understood industrial expansion, how migrants understood borders, and how colonized people understood empire. It does not merely add previously excluded groups to the same old historical framework. At its strongest, it changes the framework itself.
That is why the demand for “neutrality” is so often used against it. Neutrality sounds fair, but in a society divided by class and power, what passes for neutrality usually means accepting the dominant framework without naming it. A lesson that repeats official history is considered objective. A lesson that examines whose interests official history serves is accused of being political.
Yet every curriculum makes choices. Someone selects the events, voices, concepts, and conflicts students will encounter. Someone decides whether industrialization is primarily a story of inventions or of labor exploitation; whether westward expansion is a story of settlement or Indigenous dispossession; whether Palestine is taught through diplomatic agreements or through the lived experiences of occupation and displacement. The curriculum is already political before an ethnic studies teacher enters the room.
The real question is not whether teachers will teach from a perspective. The question is whether the dominant perspective will remain invisible and uncontested.
Preserving the History of the Working Class
Working-class history is not simply a collection of inspiring stories about past strikes. It is the accumulated memory of people discovering their collective power. It contains the lessons of organization, solidarity, defeat, betrayal, repression, and victory. It shows students that the rights they possess were not generously handed down by benevolent institutions. They were won by people who organized, resisted, and frequently risked their livelihoods or lives.
The eight-hour day, public education, workplace safety rules, child-labor restrictions, civil rights, voting rights, and countless other gains were not products of ruling-class goodwill. They were concessions extracted through struggle. Remove that history, and young people are left with the impression that progress occurs when people politely petition authority and authority eventually develops a conscience.
That is a comforting story for those in power. It is also historically absurd.
A working class deprived of its history is weakened in the present. Workers who do not know how earlier generations organized are easier to isolate. Workers who believe every injustice is unprecedented have difficulty recognizing patterns. Workers who view exploitation as personal misfortune rather than a class relation are more likely to blame themselves than the system.
Preserving working-class history is therefore not nostalgia. It is part of preparing the future. Historical consciousness allows students to recognize that the world they inherit was constructed by human beings and can be reconstructed by them. It transforms history from a museum of finished events into a record of unresolved struggle.
This is what the ruling class fears: not simply students learning unfamiliar facts, but students discovering that ordinary people have repeatedly changed history through collective action.
Why Teachers Become Targets
The intimidation of ethnic studies teachers should be understood within this struggle over historical consciousness. Records requests, public accusations, lawsuits, online harassment, and political pressure do more than target individual educators. They send a warning throughout the profession.
The most effective act of censorship does not always remove a book or formally ban a lesson. Sometimes it merely teaches educators to anticipate punishment. A teacher begins to wonder whether a particular source is worth the trouble. A discussion is shortened. A lesson is softened. A historical conclusion is surrounded by so many disclaimers that it arrives in the classroom wearing protective padding.
The teacher may technically remain free to teach, but freedom becomes increasingly theoretical when exercising it can threaten one’s employment, reputation, privacy, or family.
The purpose of intimidation is therefore broader than disciplining a handful of teachers. It is to create examples. Once educators have seen colleagues publicly targeted, the warning no longer needs to be delivered individually. The profession begins policing itself.
Students pay the price. They receive a curriculum shaped not by historical evidence or educational need, but by the boundaries of what frightened institutions consider politically survivable. Administrators may call this balance. Lawyers may call it risk management. Teachers know it by a simpler name: fear.
The Fraud of “Both Sides”
Policies requiring teachers to present every controversial issue through strict impartiality appear reasonable only until they are applied to actual history. Should students hear both sides of chattel slavery? Should racial segregation receive an advocate? Must colonialism be balanced by a presentation on its benefits to the colonized? Perhaps every unit on child labor should include a cheerful factory owner explaining how small hands reach efficiently between machinery.
Historical study requires examining competing interpretations, but that is not the same as pretending every position has equal evidentiary or moral weight. Teachers help students evaluate arguments, evidence, context, and power. We do not serve them by disguising falsehood as balance.
Forced neutrality also strips history of human agency. Oppression becomes an unfortunate disagreement between equally situated parties. The enslaved and enslaver, colonized and colonizer, worker and owner appear as participants in a misunderstanding that might have been resolved if everyone had practiced better communication skills.
But history is shaped by conflicts between groups possessing unequal power. Ignoring that inequality does not produce neutrality. It conceals domination.
When teachers are forbidden from naming those relationships, the ruling class does not become absent from the lesson. Its perspective becomes the lesson.
Schools and the Limits of Community Control
Public schools must remain connected to the communities they serve. Students do not enter classrooms as blank individuals separated from family, culture, language, and social experience. Communities should participate in educational life, challenge discrimination, demand accountability, and insist that schools meet the needs of their children.
But participation cannot mean that any organized group possesses veto power over historical knowledge.
A public school cannot function if every political constituency may remove material it dislikes. Parents should know what is being taught, but knowledge of the curriculum is not ownership of it. A society that allows each family to opt out of every difficult history abandons the very idea of public education. Students would share buildings but no longer share a common intellectual world.
This fragmentation serves the ruling class. The less common history students possess, the easier it becomes to divide them. The histories of Black resistance, Indigenous survival, immigrant labor, women’s struggle, queer liberation, and Palestinian dispossession are not isolated special-interest stories. They are interconnected parts of the history of class society.
To erase one weakens the understanding of all.
Teachers Possess Power Only Collectively
Teachers often underestimate their position in the struggle over ideas. We encounter millions of young people during the period when they are first learning to connect personal experience to the larger world. That gives education enormous social importance, but it does not give individual teachers secure power.
An isolated teacher is vulnerable. A school district can discipline an individual. A political organization can target a name. A hostile campaign can drag one educator through weeks or years of stress. Moral courage matters, but courage without organization can become martyrdom, and the working class has already produced more than enough martyrs.
Teachers preserve their power by exercising it collectively.
That means refusing to allow targeted educators to stand alone. It means responding to attacks as a workforce rather than as a collection of private professionals. It means building connections among ethnic studies teachers, classroom educators, students, parents, and workers outside education. It means recognizing that the defense of historical truth cannot be delegated entirely to administrators, attorneys, elected officials, or union functionaries.
The union bureaucracy will often try to reduce political attacks to manageable grievances, procedural disputes, or lobbying campaigns. This reflects its position as a mediator between workers and the existing order. But the struggle over historical consciousness exceeds the normal boundaries of collective bargaining. A contract can provide important protections; it cannot by itself overcome the political power that determines which histories are treated as legitimate.
Teachers therefore need more than representation. We need class consciousness.
The Battle for the Future
The ruling class preserves its power partly by presenting the existing world as the only possible world. Its ideas become ordinary common sense. Its institutions become permanent. Its history becomes universal history. Exploitation becomes economics, empire becomes security, and resistance becomes extremism.
Ethnic studies interrupts this ideological process. It preserves memories that the ruling class would prefer to reduce to commemorative months, sanitized heroes, and harmless slogans. It reminds students that oppressed people were not simply acted upon. They thought, organized, resisted, and fought to transform their conditions.
The struggle to preserve that history is not separate from the struggle to change the future. Students who recognize themselves as historical subjects may begin to understand that they possess collective power. They may see that the poverty, racism, war, displacement, and exploitation surrounding them are not natural conditions. They may conclude that a society organized around private profit rather than human need can and must be replaced.
This is why teachers must fight. Not because every individual lesson is revolutionary, and not because teachers alone can emancipate the working class. Education cannot substitute for political organization. But neither can a working-class movement advance while its history is erased, distorted, or surrendered to those who rule.
Teachers stand at one of the places where social memory is either preserved or destroyed. We can reproduce the ruling ideas of the age as though they were neutral facts, or we can help students examine where those ideas came from, whose interests they serve, and what histories they exclude.
That choice will not remain professionally safe. The ruling class does not surrender control over history simply because teachers submit a well-designed lesson plan. Preserving working-class memory requires collective resistance, solidarity with targeted educators, and an understanding that our authority in the classroom ultimately depends upon power built outside it.
The fight over ethnic studies is therefore not merely about what appears in the curriculum. It is about whether working people will retain access to their own past, recognize themselves in history, and use its lessons to shape the future.
It is a fight over who has the power to remember.
And whoever controls that power helps determine what the next generation will believe is possible.