The Revolution Will Be Literate: Why We Must Reclaim Truth, Science, and Our Children’s Minds

I’ve spent two decades obsessing about creating better schools. I’ve fought for books, for assessments, for standards, for options—for kids. And lately, I feel like I’m screaming into the void. Because even as we win some battles in education, we’re losing the war for the public mind.

We were warned about a time like now. In The Demon-Haunted World, scientist Carl Sagan imagined a nation “dependent on science and technology, in which no one knows anything about science and technology.” A nation where superstition thrives and critical thinking withers. A nation where truth is not pursued, but manufactured—where political loyalty matters more than evidence. 

Damn. Sound familiar?

We are in that time. We swim in a flood of stunning anti-intellectualism. A time when populist leaders turn lying into a performance art, when the Dunning-Kruger effect becomes a governing philosophy, and when kakistocracy—the rule of the least qualified—replaces competence with cultism. This isn’t just bad politics. It’s societal suicide.

The rot is spreading. Book bans. Bizarre laws against teaching history. Government websites stripped of climate data and pandemic facts. The criminalization of education itself.

We are watching, in real time, the dismantling of our shared understanding of the world. And schools—our first line of defense against ignorance—are under siege.

If I sound alarmed, it’s because I am. I’m not just an education advocate. I’m an educationist. I believe that literacy is liberation. That young people must be trained to distinguish fact from fiction, evidence from ideology, signal from noise. I believe, to the bone, that the revolution will be literate—or it will not be.

But right now, illiteracy and illiberalism are metastasizing. We have too many young people captive to misinformation—hooked on TikToks that glamorize conspiracy theories and scrolling timelines that erase nuance, erase complexity, erase critical thought. Their schools, often broken and neglected, are not equipped to fight back.

And neither are we.

We’re too busy playing defense. Arguing over anti-library and bathroom bills while the bigger picture collapses. We forget that a child’s cognitive sovereignty—their ability to think for themselves—is not a luxury. It’s the foundation of democracy. If we don’t protect it, we’re not just failing our kids. We’re abandoning the entire idea of a free society.

Sagan offered a way out: science. Not as a pile of facts, but as a way of thinking. As a candle in the dark. As a tool that demands we ask hard questions, demand strong evidence, and stay skeptical even of our own convictions. Science is not perfect, but it is self-correcting. It is the closest thing we have to truth with a capital T.

Which is why it’s so dangerous to the authoritarians attempting to grab all powers and install tech feudalism. The broligarchy believes we should be compliant little drones, dependent and unquestioning. 

Trump and his allies don’t just want to shrink the Department of Education—they want to destroy its capacity for educating. They don’t just want to slash science funding—they want to gut the very idea of science as a public good. In their world, truth is a threat. Facts are whatever serves power. And intellect is elitism.

We cannot let them win.

We need to fiercely defend and rebuild our schools—physically and philosophically. We need to create a culture and creed that resolves to improve our children's intellectual self-defense, with or without the school.

Learning must be everywhere, open, a collective project of resistant, informed, and activist adults. We need to train young minds in the habits of evidence, empathy, curiosity, and dissent. We need to teach them not what to think, but how to think. We need to put science back on the pedestal. And we need to stop pretending that neutrality is wisdom in a time of epistemic collapse.

Want to show how serious you are at this moment? Aunties, buy your nieces and nephews books. Uncles, get them into museums. Grandparents, read to them. Guardians, teach them practical lessons about how our systems of government work. Community members—form more spaces for communal learning—for adults and kids. 

And voters—you know what to do. Elect the resistance and support public education.

This is not a drill. Our children’s ability to discern truth from fiction is on the line. So is our democracy. So is our future.

If we don’t act now, the next generation won’t just grow up in broken schools. They’ll grow up in a broken reality.

And we will have no one to blame but ourselves.