The Hijacking of American Classrooms and How We Can Reclaim Them

It’s time to return to education grounded in reason, resilience, and individual dignity

Last year, I participated in the documentary Killing America, which highlighted the cultural unraveling of our country—a phenomenon not born out of natural decay, but deliberately sewn through ideology disguised as justice. Nowhere is this more apparent, and more dangerous, than in our K-12 education system, where a radical shift is reshaping how our children see themselves and each other.

Across the country, lessons grounded in the oppressor/oppressed framework are being embedded throughout public school curricula. These programs, while cloaked in the language of inclusion and empowerment, are planting seeds of division and fragility in our children’s still-developing brains. They do not teach history for the sake of understanding or wisdom; they teach it to inflame, to polarize, and to permanently categorize students based on immutable characteristics like race, gender, or ancestry.

This isn’t education. It’s political activism.

In this distorted worldview, children are first taught to see themselves through the lens of victimhood or guilt—not as individuals capable of reason, resilience, and growth. Those labeled “oppressed” are socialized into a mindset of learned helplessness, internalizing a belief that the deck is forever stacked against them. Meanwhile, those deemed “oppressors” are burdened with shame for sins they did not commit and are powerless to atone for. The result is a generation of youth robbed of agency, conditioned to believe either that the system is too rigged to reward them or too evil to be worth preserving.

This mindset is not just philosophically corrosive; it is psychologically damaging. In these important formative years, the adolescent brain is still forming. Identity, motivation, and moral reasoning are being shaped every day in the classroom. Hard-wiring children with the idea that their destiny is dictated by inherited shame based on their race or other immutable characteristic is antithetical to the founding principles of our country. And while our schools are busy glorifying “resistance” over resilience, our children are falling behind in the very basics of learning.

According to the latest data, reading and math scores are plummeting to historic lows. In some states, nearly half of students can’t read or perform math at grade level. An illiterate generation is not only more vulnerable to propaganda; it is also ripe for radicalization. Without critical thinking skills, how can a child discern truth from ideology, justice from revenge, or community from mob rule?

Instead of equipping students with the tools to think, reason, and succeed, we are immersing them in ideological narratives that divide and disempower. Our schools should be sanctuaries of learning, not battlegrounds for political dogma. Education should prepare children to be hopeful and productive, not primed for lifelong grievance.

We urgently need to return to the foundational ideals that built this nation –not a blind nostalgia, but a reaffirmation of the values that once united diverse people under a shared purpose: liberty, opportunity, individual dignity, and equality under the law. These ideals have empowered people from every race and background to strive, achieve, and belong. True belonging does not require conformity to collective ideology; it honors the unique worth of each person.

This is why the difference between equality of opportunity and equity must be clarified. Equality of opportunity ensures that every child has the same chance to rise, regardless of where they start. Equity, as it is currently weaponized, demands equal outcomes and punishes merit, excellence, or independence. It flattens ambition and undermines the very diversity of thought we claim to value.

We must ask ourselves: What kind of citizens are we raising? Do we want children who feel emboldened to shape their futures, or ones who are taught to see themselves as permanently wronged or perpetually guilty? Do we want students who can think for themselves, or who merely repeat the language of their ideological training?

The future of our country depends on the answer.

We must demand a return to education rooted in knowledge, character, and critical inquiry. We must reject the cynical narratives that divide children by race, pit them against each other, and glorify resistance over responsibility. Our children deserve better. Our country deserves better. And if we don’t course-correct now, we may find ourselves raising future generations who are not only illiterate in reading and math,but who don’t even understand what it means to be American.

That’s where FAIR’s American Experience curriculum comes in.

FAIR’s groundbreaking social studies course offers high school students a healthy, balanced, and fundamentally different path forward. Rather than whitewashing America’s complex and difficult history or reducing it to simplistic narratives of oppression and resistance, FAIR’s curriculum teaches students to grapple with the nuances of the American story. Students explore how different groups—from colonial Europeans to enslaved Africans, from Native Americans to new waves of immigrants from all over the world —have navigated the ongoing challenge of building unity from diversity while testing, expanding and realizing American ideals of freedom and equality.

The result is an educational experience that helps students understand what makes us different and what we share, who can articulate their own perspectives while genuinely engaging with others’. Instead of being trained to see themselves as either “oppressors” or “oppressed,” they learn to see themselves as vital parts of our ongoing American experiment in democratic pluralism, endowed with both the knowledge and skills to help that experiment succeed.

FAIR’s curriculum is exactly what American schools need now: grounded education that builds citizens, not activists—young Americans who can think critically, engage civilly, and work collaboratively toward common goals while respecting their legitimate differences.

This is a vitally important effort that all civic-minded Americans, and especially parents, can and should support.

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