A student raises his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “there is this word you keep repeating, and I have no idea what it is. It starts with an “f”.”
“Yes,” other students agree. “You keep saying it but we don’t get it!”
After a protracted struggle, I discover that the word they don’t get is “fascism.”
“Does anybody know what it is?” I ask.
Students stare.
“Or at least what area of life it belongs to?” I inquire, hoping against all hope to hear the word “politics”.
Students stare.
“Is it a flower? A book? A person?” I continue.
Students stare.
This will be a long semester.
Clarissa's Blog 
sadly as a historian I’m all too aware of this lapse in teaching. I always wonder HOW world war II is explained without reference to fascism. I think they just believe Nazis were “bad”
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I’ve almost been reduced to asking “so do you think fascism is something good? Or something bad?”
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Facism, communism, liberalism, modernism are all so 20th Century. We’re in the post-modern age. I’m more than a little concerned. Hope you are too.
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We cannot afford not to know what fascism is in this country.
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Is Nazism = Facism + Race theory?
I don’t remember the definition, but think in Israel uni students would know approximately at least what it is. In US too everybody must pass high school graduation examination in history, Second World War included, right? How can they be so ignorant in your opinion? Bad students? Horrible teachers? Bad school curriculum?
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I hear that history and geography are pretty much dead in high schools here. WWI is a complete blank. WWII a little less so but still pretty bad.
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Those two disciplines, and maybe a few others, were bundled together into an amalgam called social studies.
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Fascism was an attempt by various governments to “revive” their nations by exhorting their public to identify with a “glorious past” and attempting to “regenerate” a pure society. So economically, they nationalized a few critical industries and most resources and distributed the resources to favored private companies that the government thought would contribute most to the revival of national greatness and grandeur. In Italy, it was the Roman Empire. In Germany, it was Karl der Grosse and, of course, Wagner’s Valhalla. The motto in Germany-Austria after the Anschluss was “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer “: “One people, one nation, one leader”. In Japan, it was the Tohokai which wanted to revive the imperial greatness and the code of the Samurai. In all of these movements or parties, the great pure society that they sought to regenerate was, of course, racially pure: pure Italian, pure German, pure Japanese. So, racism was a component of fascism, but not the major component. The anti-Jewish emphasis of Nazism was built on the anti-Jewish writings and parties that were prevalent in late 19th and early 20th Century Vienna as Hitler was growing up. Jewish German and Austrian citizens could never be “pure German” and strut around to the “Die Walküre” since they weren’t part of the pre-historic tribe. Of course, this tribe never existed and was a fictional creation of Wagner base on the folktales in the Norse “Volsunga Saga” and “Poetic Edda”. But the “purity” of the race theme in western Europe was also anti-Roma, anti-Slavic, anti-homosexual and anti-anything else that might be considered not German, not Hungarian, not Italian. The important organizational point was that by getting the working poor to hate some group weaker than they were, they could feel superior and that could be used to structure them into functional units to achieve national goals. This was the same organizational principle behind the Ku Klux Klan in the US. By getting poor whites to hate blacks and see them as competition for employment, they could be convinced to stop looking at how they were being economically exploited. The same thing is happening with the working poor and disenfranchised middle class in relation to “Hispanics” in the US today. Just look at the recent court decision regarding the Alabama law.
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this is one of the best reasoned expositions of fascism i’ve read!
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I agree!
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The words my students don’t know are different—that is, they may not know fascism, but it hasn’t come up as a topic in Chaucer—but I have had a lot of those face-palm moments this term. And it’s only week 6. I have to say I’m relieved to know that it isn’t just me.
I feel I should also add that my students are nice, bright, and eager to learn; they just have no background and few study skills. At upper-division level. Not freshmen. I’m a bit worried about what students will be like in another few years.
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Obviously a reform of secondary education is needed.
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I find this surprising. I am a much older than usual postgrad and deal with undergrads a fair amount, mainly mathematics students. While most of them have a reasonable handle on politics, none seem to have any idea what constitutes a proof.
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I am having EXACTLY the same problem this semester. What worries me as a foreign language teacher is that that lack of general knowledge prevent my students to further their knowledge of the language they learn. My students know the grammatical rules, but because of their lack of general knowledge their ideas remain hopelessly vague. Like Dame Elanor Hull’s students, many of my students are bright and eager to learn, but sadly we professors have to provide general education that I thought was covered during secondary education.
I also mentioned to some students in class yesterday that secondary education in the US is mediocre in comparison to other developed countries. They felt very offended.
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Well what did you expect? You are obviously looking down on them and pitying them. Not a very tactful way to make your point.
I tired long ago of hearing, and coming up with responses to, exclamations of how ignorant and generally inferior (racist, ignorant, passive, fat) Americans are.
“but sadly we professors have to provide general education that I thought was covered during secondary education.”
You are worrying needlessly. The information has to be presented to them again anyway (they can’t be expected to remember every detail from years ago). Just make them work harder, they are obviously thirsting for the knowledge.
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It’s not surprising. It was only last year that it was explained to me that fascism and communism are different. People in my class thought Nazi Germany was communist, and didn’t understand why there was so much anti-communist propaganda.
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Yes, I’ve had this problem, too. Students are always surprised to find out that fascism and communism are located on the opposite sides of the political spectrum.
This year, however, I won’t have this problem because they don’t know the word “fascism” at all.
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If you really want to blow their minds, tell them the first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, was opened to hold Communists.
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