School and politics: feeling of breathlessness

T he country is moving to the right, young people are growing up with authoritarian positions. What does this mean for the educational mission of schools? From now on, two politics teachers from Berlin and Brandenburg will regularly report here on how they deal with this in class. They are also involved in an educational association that makes teaching material freely accessible: the Critical Education Working Group.

It is Sunday evening, September 6th, 2026. There has been an election in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD doubled its share of the vote and reached 43.8 percent, the highest figure in its party history. The world is moving. The school week starts tomorrow. I will talk to four classes about it. Even before class begins, I can feel the excited atmosphere in the classes - a historical event.

Currently I have this feeling every three months. It is a feeling of breathlessness in the changing present. As a teacher of politics and philosophy, I feel a particular urgency to provide interpretations of these events. The students want orientation in the overwhelming demands, they long for order in the chaos of the present. I feel a strong responsibility. I would call it anti-fascist responsibility.

is 36 and a teacher of politics and philosophy

Back to Monday: I notice that the seventh graders are already sneering at the AfD voters in a divisive and derogatory way. “THEY ARE AS STUPID AS MONKEYS,” I hear in the crowd before class begins. I feel like I want to sort things out: What do the students need from me? I think that I first have to point out the hasty blanket assessment in order to then move on to a substantive analysis. The students should find their way into their own thinking. You must learn to examine and judge the present based on your own values. This simplified friend-enemy thinking doesn't help here. The students think the AfD voters are stupid because they hate them. This is not a point of view, but divisive thinking.

The lesson begins. The students can recite the exact election results from memory, and arguments come out of them with which they demonize the AfD. I record the impulse and draw a red line on the whiteboard. On the one hand the AfD and on the other side the other parties. The first argument that all classes give today is the unlimited deportation plans. I'll write this first on the AfD website. But wait a minute: We also find much of the content that shocks students in the government parties. Horst Seehofer celebrates 69 deported Afghans on his 69th birthday. So this argument also goes to the “friends” side. We do not find reassurance in this knowledge. However, the focus on content dampens the hysteria.

I repeat the analysis with the red line in the following classes. One point always remains with the AfD: the state association of Saxony-Anhalt is classified by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as “certainly right-wing extremist”.

I don't really know how I feel about it myself. This angry mob that no longer bothers with electing violent neo-Nazis as representatives. I feel myself mentally stumbling. Didn't I just fall into the mindset of the blustering seventh graders? Isn't that simply another formulation for a blanket devaluation of AfD voters? This Monday at school feels long.

In the evening I reflect on the day. In the classroom I was composed and focused. This evening I feel compassion for my students, whose youthful lightheartedness was once again shaken today. But I also see that they bear the historical turbulence almost routinely. It's their normality. They don't know anything else. Tomorrow is the next day of school in this turbulent normality.