Let’s All Go Back to School: Why Learning Is Our Greatest Act of Resistance

By James Peterson | WURD Radio

Every August, a familiar refrain rains on our summer: It’s time to get ready to go back to school. Parents scan school-supply lists, teachers brace themselves for crowded classrooms, and students groan about the end of summer. “Back to school” is a season, an ethos, a ritual. But in this moment—one marked by an autocratically induced, systemic diminishment of education at all levels—we should all embrace the spirit of going back to school. Not just students. Not just teachers. All of us.

This fall, let’s go back to school together. Let’s make learning itself a collective act of resistance.

The Trump administration’s hostility toward education is neither accidental nor peripheral. It is strategic. When federal leaders float proposals to defund or abolish the Department of Education, when they attack universities like Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania as “elitist” or “corrupt,” when they strip resources from public schools under the guise of efficiency—they are executing a plan. That plan is as old as authoritarianism itself: to control the people by diminishing our access to knowledge.

Autocratic regimes thrive on ignorance. They depend on a public too overwhelmed, distracted or underinformed to ask hard questions. They blur the lines between truth and falsehood, expertise and conspiracy, history and propaganda. The goal is not simply to weaken educational institutions but to weaken the very idea of education—curiosity, questioning, intellectual risk-taking—as a public good. And so, in the face of this assault, the most radical thing we can do is insist on learning.

Ironically, the etymology of the word school itself points us toward a strategy of resistance. School derives from the ancient Greek word scholē, which means “leisure.” In Athens, only those with sufficient leisure— primarily wealthy men—were able to devote themselves to study. Education was not initially conceived as drudgery or compulsion but as a privilege: the time to reflect, to inquire, to learn.

That history is complicated. It reminds us that access to learning has always been unequal, a prize rationed according to social standing, gender and class. But it also gives us a profound reminder for our own moment: education is not just about formal institutions or credentialing. At its core, education is about what we do with our time—however limited that time may be.

Most of us do not live with vast reserves of leisure. Our lives are pressed by work, caregiving, commuting, financial strain and endless obligations. But even slivers of leisure—15 minutes on a lunch break, an hour in the evening—can be redirected toward study. In doing so, we reclaim the original spirit of scholē. We transform what little leisure we have into the foundation of resistance.

In 2025, “leisure” might mean scrolling on our phones, collapsing in front of a screen, or trying to numb ourselves after exhausting days. But what if we treated leisure differently? What if we understood it not just as recovery but as opportunity?

You don’t have to enroll in a degree program to go back to school this fall. Pick a subject that matters to you right now. Watch a free lecture series on American history or African philosophy. Open a gardening manual, a geometry textbook, or a poetry anthology. Use Khan Academy, Coursera, or even YouTube tutorials. Resources for self-education have never been more abundant—even in this time of political and material scarcity.

The point is not credentialing. The point is sharpening the mind in a moment when forces of power are working overtime to dull it. To spend leisure on learning is to say: I refuse to be made ignorant. I refuse to let distraction or despair become my only refuge. Leisure, reoriented toward learning, becomes not indulgence but weapon.

We do not need to imagine education as resistance—it is already written into history.

Enslaved people in the United States risked beatings, imprisonment, even death to learn how to read and write. Figures like Frederick Douglass recalled how literacy was seen by enslavers as dangerous—because it was. To read meant to imagine freedom. To write meant to testify. To learn meant to loosen the chains of mental captivity, even before physical bondage was broken. Every stolen lesson was an act of defiance.

During the Civil Rights Movement, education again became a frontline of resistance. In 1964, during Freedom Summer in Mississippi, activists established Freedom Schools. These were not merely supplemental classrooms; they were radical spaces where Black children and adults studied history, civics, and philosophy deliberately omitted from segregated public schools. They learned how to analyze the structures of racism that oppressed them and how to envision a different future. To attend a Freedom School was to prepare for freedom.

In Brazil, educator Paulo Freire led literacy campaigns among the poor and disenfranchised. His landmark work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, argued that education should not be a “banking system” where authorities deposit facts into passive students, but a dialogue where learners and teachers engage critically with the world. Dictators feared Freire’s work so much that he was imprisoned and exiled. Why? Because teaching peasants to read meant teaching them to question—and questioning was revolutionary.

From the plantations of the American South to the church basements of Mississippi to the sugarcane fields of Brazil, education has always threatened those who depend on submission. These histories remind us that learning is never neutral. It is always a choice between passive acceptance of the status quo or a proactive pursuit of knowledge and liberation.

Consider what authoritarian regimes fear most. Not just protests, not just voting blocs, but informed citizens. People who can see through propaganda. People who recognize historical patterns. People who know their rights and know when those rights are being stripped away.

In short: learners.

The attack on education in America today is not about saving taxpayer dollars or correcting inefficiency. It is about suppressing precisely that kind of citizen. If the public can be kept uninformed—if literacy remains stagnant, if critical thinking erodes, if scientific knowledge is dismissed—then power consolidates. But knowledge multiplies. It does not stay confined to the individual. One person who learns something new teaches it to another. Parents pass it to their children. Communities share it in libraries, churches, and coffee shops. Ignorance isolates; learning connects.