One of the most tragic developments of the last few decades has been the subversion of our universities by radicals. With the exception of a few rear guard actions by brave conservative students, American higher education is now little more than an indoctrination chamber for cultural Marxism, identity racism and other anti-American ideas. And now, to make their victory complete, leftwing radicals are targeting our public schools with a similar campaign. Today’s K-12 classroom is an war zone with the left using its control of teachers’ unions, teacher training schools in the universities, and textbook publishing to launch an all out effort to indoctrinate students as young as kindergarten with “correct thinking” on subjects ranging from the perdurability of white racism and the “fluidity” of gender to the evils of “Islamophobia” and the coming man-made Armageddon of climate change. To combat this onslaught, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has initiated a campaign called Stop K-12 Indoctrination. Its fundamental principle is that students should be taught how to think, not what to think. Its centerpiece is a Code of Ethics that works, in collaboration with state legislators, to forbid teachers from using the classroom to advance an ideological agenda. Its flagship publication is a weekly newsletter, under the editorship of Sara Dogan, that reports from the educational battlefront. The subjects covered by the Stop K-12 Indoctrination Newsletter in recent issues show the extent of the left’s penetration into American public education and the ambition of its indoctrination effort:
• The teacher in a Virginia high school fired for refusing to use male pronouns for a biologically female student who identifies as transgender.
• The Minnesota school district seeking to adopt a high school history text by a leftist university professor whose tone is summarized by its treatment of Donald Trump, about whom the author writes, “… His not very well hidden racism connected with a significant number of voters.” Clinton voters, on the other hand, are characterized as being justifiably fearful of “the mental instability of the President elect and the anger that he and his supporters
have brought to the nation.”
• The teacher in Janesville, Wisconsin, who showed a leftist video in class titled “Why the Rich Love Destroying Unions” produced by the al Jazeera Media Network.
• The text assigned by the public high school in Newton Massachusetts funded by the Saudi Arabian oil company Aramco that states, among other things, that there is a “Hollywood Jewish campaign” to portray Arabs negatively in films and that Jerusalem is “Palestine’s capital.” The Newton public schools’ superintendent excised public comments questioning this anti Israel curriculum from minutes of a school board meeting.
• The textbook for first graders in Elk Grove California that glorified California Governor Gavin Newsom, then running for office, as a “Champion for Peoples’ Rights” because of his support for gay marriage.
• The public charter school in Atlanta that dropped the morning recital of the Pledge of Allegiance in favor of a “Wolf Pack Chant” because the Pledge is insufficiently “inclusive.”
These are educational horror stories. But they show that the left’s attempted takeover of the nation’s public schools can succeed only if it is allowed to take place in the dark. That is why the Stop K-12 Indoctrination Newsletter is so
important. The steady light it shines on this sinister effort is both a disinfectant and also a battle cry for concerned parents, education advocacy groups, and state officials who have the ability to ensure that our nation’s classrooms are places of objective and unbiased learning.
Read the full pamphlet: