Elites Want to Turn Schools Into Factories of Hopelessness. We Can’t Let Them.

What happens when the most powerful people give up on the future — but still control the schools?

To understand what’s happening in education today — the banning of books, the rise of AI that surveils and dehumanizes learning, the outlawing of honest lessons on race and gender, and the criminalization of critical thought — we must look beyond the classroom and name the dystopia being built around us.

Prophetic storytellers have long warned us about this moment. What once read as science fiction is fast becoming science nonfiction. In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler envisioned a nation unraveling under climate collapse and corporate rule, where the wealthy retreat to walled-off company towns protected by private security. Neill Blomkamp’s film Elysium imagined a world where the elite flee the earth to an orbital fortress.

What Butler and Blomkamp warned of in fiction, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor now name in fact. In a searing essay for The Guardian, they call this era end times fascism: a grim convergence of white supremacist nationalism, billionaire bunker fantasies, apocalyptic Christian Zionism and a pandemic response that treats mass death as collateral for profit.

At the heart of this strategy is a billionaire exodus — a flight from accountability and from the world they set ablaze. Plutocrat preppers like Elon Musk envision colonizing Mars through SpaceX, building a self-sustaining city governed by AI and populated by a select few. Jeff Bezos talks of offloading Earth’s industry to space. Peter Thiel has invested in luxury bunkers in New Zealand and backed “seasteading” projects aimed at building floating, privately governed city states in international waters beyond the reach of democratic regulation. This isn’t science fiction. It’s class war — the ultrarich abandoning the rest of us to climate collapse and surveillance capitalism, while shielding themselves behind fortress walls, digital firewalls and ideologies that sanctify abandonment.

Consider the world they’re trying to escape: 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded. Wildfires in Los Angeles revealed the scale of the unfolding climate catastrophe, causing rising sea levels, crop failures and mass displacement. The AI arms race is accelerating, with experts warning of mass labor displacement, autonomous weapons and systems beyond human control. Nuclear tensions are rising. And the U.S. government is funding the bombing of schools, universities, hospitals and mosques in Gaza — while punishing teachers who allow students to even debate the morality of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Schooling is being recast as a tool not just for compliance and surveillance, but for instilling hopelessness and surrender.

This is end times schooling — and we must decide whether to be its instruments or its interruption.

Armageddon Academics

You can see it in the criminalization of truth. Today, nearly half of U.S. public school students attend schools where teachers are banned from teaching honestly about race, gender or sexuality. Texas law prohibits teachers from giving credit for student civic engagement. The statute reads: “[A] teacher may not require, make part of a course, or award a grade or course credit … for a student’s … efforts to persuade members of the legislative or executive branch at the federal, state, or local level to take specific actions by direct communication.” Laws like this are about crushing the idea that education can empower students to make change.

You can see it in the rise of AI tutors and scripted lessons that sever learning from human relationships. AI is being used to justify fewer teachers, larger class sizes and automated discipline — where algorithms decide who gets flagged, suspended or punished. The result is a digital caste system: Rich youth get mentorship and creativity; the rest get automation and monitoring.

You can see it in the crackdown on teaching and protesting the genocide in Gaza: educators disciplined, students arrested and campus groups disbanded for daring to name the violence.

And you see it in what we could call “armageddon academics”: the near-total erasure of climate crisis education. For example, McDougal Littell’s Modern World History limited climate change to just three paragraphs, claimed “not all scientists agree,” and blamed the Global South for inaction — without quoting a single person affected by climate collapse.

This is schooling for extinction.

The fascist project has no room for young people who think critically, question authority, or imagine a world beyond border walls, binaries and bunkers.

An Unshakable Belief in the Future

The antidote is not denial; it’s defiant hope and collective action. As the editors of Rethinking Schools remind us, “To step into a classroom is to express confidence in young people’s capacity to learn, to grow, to change, to make a difference — to do good in the world.”

We need to say this out loud. Because everything about end times schooling tells young people their lives don’t matter — that nothing they do will make a difference.

But history tells us otherwise.

Every major movement for justice — abolition, labor, civil rights, anti-colonial uprisings — was built during hard times, under hostile regimes. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began just months after Rosa Parks told fellow organizers she didn’t believe anything big would happen in her city. Then she acted — and history turned. Before that, the 1936–37 Flint Sit-Down Strike erupted at the height of the Great Depression, when autoworkers faced brutal conditions and mass unemployment — and still seized General Motors’ Fisher Body plants, holding them for 44 days until they forced the company to recognize their union.

If end times fascism tells students there’s no future, we must teach as if the future is ours to shape. If schools are being weaponized to train youth for extinction, then education must become a form of survival — rooted in truth, care, resistance and imagination.

And that kind of education is already happening — in walkouts for Gaza, in classrooms defying book bans, in radical reading groups and mutual aid projects. Just listen to Alex Ames, one of the founding members of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition (GYJC), speaking at the “Our Freedom to Learn” forum hosted by HEAL Together:

It has been an incredible three years at GYJC since we first started building young people’s power toward education justice and toward multiracial democracy. Just this spring, we defeated the largest voucher bill in Georgia’s history. We stopped “Don’t Say Gay” legislation for the second time in two years — they keep coming back. We halted policies criminalizing librarians or banning gender-affirming medical care. And we won $25 million for public school counselors that our students need. And last year we halted every book ban in the state. … I also should mention we just won the largest public school budget in the entire history of the state of Georgia.

This is what end times fascists fear most: the imagination of a generation not willing to disappear quietly.

Educating against end times schooling doesn’t mean offering shallow optimism; it means helping students confront the world as it is — and insisting it doesn’t have to stay that way.

The Struggle for New Beginnings

We must travel back in time — through conversations with elders, research and engagement with study groups — to remember what has been stolen and to gather lessons from the people and movements who dared to fight back. Then we must travel to the future — through the power of radical imagination — to glimpse a world where housing is a right, where we feed people instead of bombing them, where freedom isn’t gated, policed or sold. (If you need a high-powered time machine: the Zinn Education Project offers free people’s history lessons; Molly Crabapple paints revolutionary futures into being; and Afrofuturists like Octavia Butler, Sun Ra and Ryan Coogler carry us forward beyond today’s limits.) Only then can we return to the present, with new perspectives and strategies, ready to fight.

Billionaires know this. That’s why they are trying to smash the curricular “flux capacitors” of social justice classrooms — curricular devices that allow students to travel through history, with freedom to dream about the future and act in the present.

They know they cannot inflict end times fascism without turning classrooms into graveyards for hope. That’s why they’re attacking schools with such ferocity.

But if we refuse to surrender the schools, they cannot win.

The 2018–19 Red State Revolt showed us how to fight back. Educators in GOP-controlled states like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona won dramatic gains by shutting down their entire school systems until funding for public education was substantially increased.

The Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) recent contract victory shows what that resistance can build. CTU not only won higher wages, but also protections for teaching the truth about race, gender and sexuality; investments in housing and mental health; immigrant protections; and groundbreaking environmental initiatives, from installing solar panels to launching composting programs.

This is social justice unionism: bargaining for the common good.

And here is the inconvenient truth for billionaires: even in their bunkers or space stations, they still need labor — because they won’t be cleaning their shelters, caring for the sick, or repairing technology on their own.

But while billionaires need us, we don’t need them.

The world would do quite well without them — and that means we hold power. We can refuse. We can refuse to code their surveillance, fly their rockets, or educate the next generation for extinction. That spirit lives in the growing call for a general strike in 2028. After its 2023 strike victory, the UAW aligned all contracts to expire on May Day and invited other unions to do the same. CTU’s new contract expires in 2028 and they have joined with the UAW to launch an organizing initiative to prepare.

While the oligarchs are doing everything they can to make this the era of end times fascism, we are not at the end; we are at the start of a process of revealing what this country truly is and what we must overcome to achieve a new beginning — the one our ancestors dreamed of and that our children deserve.