A new report shows how students’ minds are being shaped by taxpayer-funded activism.
A new report shows how students’ minds are being shaped by taxpayer-funded activism.
‘E very child in America should be acquainted with his own country,” Noah Webster wrote in 1788. “He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty, and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in her favor.” Today’s American schoolchildren are certainly learning to rehearse useful ideas. But the exact nature of those ideas, and the ends they’re being used for, should send a shiver down the spine of anyone who cares about the real history of this country, not to mention our heritage in the heroes and statesmen of our past.
A new report from the Manhattan Institute’s Zach Goldberg and Eric Kaufmann provides some insight into what, precisely, American students are learning — and perhaps more important, how they’re being shaped by the taxpayer-funded activism that passes for education in this country today. The report begins predictably enough, detailing how “a representative survey of more than 1,500 Americans aged 18 to 20” suggests “that Critical Race Theory (CRT) and radical gender ideology, together known as Critical Social Justice (CSJ), is widespread in American schools.” Ninety-three percent of the surveyed demographic “said that they had heard about at least one of eight CSJ concepts from a teacher or other adult at school.” But the real revelation is the empirical evidence that exposure to those concepts “appears to have a significant impact in shifting children to the political left” — even if the children hail from more conservative upbringings:
In partisan terms, those exposed to no CSJ concepts break 27% to 20% for the Republican Party, while those who have been taught the maximum of eight CSJ concepts lean a whopping 53% to 7% toward the Democratic Party. In strongly Republican counties, young people taught no CSJ concepts lean Republican 38% to 20%, whereas in the same counties, those taught the maximum number of CSJ concepts lean Democratic by a stunning 46% to 14%. Parents also have less influence on their children than one might think. For instance, young people with a Republican mother who are taught no CSJ lean 61% Republican to 14% Democratic, while individuals with a Republican mother who are taught a high number of CSJ concepts in school are more balanced, at 25% Republican and 30% Democratic.
It should be clear, to anyone who’s been paying attention in recent years, that the radicalization of the American education system has reached even the deepest-red corners of the country. That’s because public education is a mass bureaucracy, with its talons hooked in well over 13,000 school districts, and nearly 50 million pupils, across America. But for all the regional, political, and demographic diversity of the populations the public-school cartel claims to serve, the bureaucracy itself — and the foot soldiers it sends out from the education schools to evangelize red America — is an ideologically homogeneous class of activist-educators who tend to have a lot more in common with Paulo Freire than James Madison. Hence, it should come as little surprise that a 2015 study highlighted by the Washington Post found that among elementary-school teachers, there were 85 Democrats for every 15 Republicans, and among high-school teachers, there were 87 Democrats for every 13 Republicans.
In the expansive reach of the public-education system, left-wing pedagogues lodged in the major education training schools — where Freire’s radical Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which called for education as a tool of “revolutionary transformation,” has “achieved near-iconic status,” Sol Stern noted in 2009 — saw a potent mechanism for a bloodless cultural revolution. In the hands of the new class, the epistemic authority of public-school teachers — the “priests of our democracy,” as Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter famously put it — was invoked as cover for transmuting revolutionary norms and values. The special status of teachers, and the traditionally favorable standing they enjoyed in the public imagination, became a weapon to bludgeon critics of the revolution. Hence, in 2021, when Merrick Garland directed the FBI to “discuss strategies for addressing” parent-led school-board uprisings, the attorney general justified the action on the grounds that the alleged “threats against public servants . . . run counter to our nation’s core values.”
The Manhattan Institute report goes a long way in illustrating the specific content of the “core values” that Garland and his allies in the teachers’ unions were defending. Among the surveyed young Americans, Goldberg and Kaufmann write, “62% reported either being taught in class or hearing from an adult in school that ‘America is a systemically racist country’; 69% that ‘white people have white privilege’; 57% that ‘white people have unconscious biases that negatively affect nonwhite people’; and 67% that ‘America is built on stolen land.’” A majority also recalled being told that “America is a patriarchal society,” and that “gender is an identity choice.”
To reiterate, this phenomenon transcends the oft-discussed blue state/red state divide. CSJ is no longer just a boutique doctrine found in San Francisco: “Republicans are highly exposed as well,” Goldberg and Kaufmann report. “Consider that even 73% of white Republicans still report being taught one of the eight [CSJ] concepts” the study tested. (I.e., “America is built on stolen land,” “gender is an identity choice,” etc.) Per Webster, America’s children today are, in fact, being taught to “lisp the praise” of a revolution. But it’s a far cry from the one that founded this country nearly two and a half centuries ago.
Funded by taxpayer dollars, defended by sympathetic national media, and even enforced, when necessary, by saber-rattling from the federal security state, the American education system today is a vehicle for waging war on the values, heritage, and progeny of the nation that created it. And as the Manhattan Institute report shows, the Freirites at the head of the bureaucracy are well on their way to remaking the next generation in their image. But you already knew all that. The only question now is what conservatives are willing to do to stop them.