Thank you so much for this thoughtful piece. I also enjoyed perusing the Many Stories, One Nation website. I teach baccalaureate-level nursing students, so my population and content focus are very specific. However, the divisive DEI ideology is alive (rebranded as culturally responsive curriculum) and well in the EdD courses that I am taking. I am tired of reading about the "whiteness of education" and that I should speak to my students in the lingo spoken at home. I am tired of diverse educational strategies that focus only on the color of the students' skin (unless the skin is white) and not on the whole person. My teaching philosophy centers on teaching students HOW to think and NOT what to think. The Many Stories, One Nation curriculum focuses on critical thinking and analysis. I hope that it is implemented in ALL high schools. Also, I shared information about the curriculum in one of my EdD discussion posts that focuses on "all good culturally responsive curriculum creators use only the 8 concepts developed by New America." I bet I lose points! Again, thank you for such a thoughtful post and for helping to develop a truly "culturally responsive" curriculum.
" Race essentialism, mandatory affinity groups, and rigid oppressor/oppressed binaries do more than oversimplify the identity of multiracial children; they subtract from them. "
It subtracts from everyone...rigid oppressor/oppressed binaries are not beneficial to anyone except those who wish to sow animosity and hatred and get power from it. Mandatory affinity groups likewise. These all reduce people to members of an identity group which is expected to think/behave/be a certain way, to a stereotype. It certainly should not be getting taught. A shared cultural history can be recognized without these rigid (unsupported, we are not stereotypes or determined by our ancestry in key ways that are assumed in these groups) assumptions.
I work adjacent to the criminal justice system, and the antics of those who like to play colored triangle bingo are at times laughable or appalling. Many of them like to obsess over jail populations, specifically what percentage of those in jail are "people of color." Never mind that booking categories don't often exist for people of Middle Eastern origin, or that 'Hispanic' is considered an ethnicity by most software as opposed to a race (so it's not often recorded).
It's incredibly sad that we now apply race to so many discussions with the same zeal the National Socialists did some years ago. And it's even sadder that so many doing the applying can't seem to see that they're doing the same thing.
Identity demands that focus on color, hair texture, sex, eye shape, and other immutable characteristics are always going to flatten and remove all the much more interesting and dynamic influences that allow the eventual emergence of our truest expression of authentic Individuality.
Unfortunately, the box checkers can only see exteriors, therefore missing entirely the much more relevant cultural influences and family belief systems that do the real work of socialized shaping of us humans.
Greg Thomas, who you mention in your article, often shares a story of a Black man in Britain who went on an ancestral pilgrimage of sorts to visit the village of his grandfather. Upon arriving he was disheartened to find that the people there treated him 100% as a British guy who happened to also be Black, whereas the cultural bent of the moment back in Britain was insisting that he was a Black man who happened to be British too.
What a powerful story that illustrates the exact cultural realities that dictate which parts of our identity are deemed to be adjectives and which are nouns!
The core issue with modern school indoctrination is that it weaponizes a child’s biological need to belong to systematically destroy their capacity for rational thought.
If you want to understand what is actually happening to children in classrooms right now, try this simple thought experiment.
Imagine a school where children are immediately divided into teams based on traits they cannot change. Day after day, they are drilled with a rigid ideology: One team is inherently bad, the other is inherently victimized. If you question this, you are a malicious person.
When a five-year-old enters this classroom, their survival depends entirely on being accepted by the group and the adults in charge. The system takes this deep, primal need to belong and turns it into a weapon. If a child notices a logical contradiction and asks a simple question, the hammer drops. They are not answered with logic; they are met with public shaming, isolation, and labels of "bias" or "denial."
To a child, the threat of exclusion from the tribe triggers raw survival panic. To escape that terror, the child's mind is forced to adapt. They learn that critical thinking leads to pain and exile, while blind compliance leads to safety and praise.
Before long, the act of reasoning itself becomes painful and terrifying. The child systematically trains their own brain to shut down awkward questions before they can even fully form. They trade their intelligence for a sense of safety, becoming psychological prisoners of the system.
This systematic grooming of minds relies on three destructive psychological mechanics that break a child's ability to function as a rational human being:
1. The Weaponization of Belonging and Infantilisation
True education builds a child's resourcefulness, encouraging them to test reality with fresh, unjaded eyes. This system practices infantilisation—actively sabotaging that development to keep children small, fearful, and dependent. By conditioning children to view every human interaction as a dangerous power struggle, schools engineer raw paranoia. When a child learns to treat their own logic as a dangerous "hidden defect," they lose the ability to think independently and become entirely dependent on institutional authorities to tell them what is safe to believe.
2. Cognitive Dissonance and Internalized Shame
Forcing a child to outwardly agree with ideas they know are contradictory creates a devastating psychological split known as cognitive dissonance. The child carries a deep, quiet shame for complying with things they do not genuinely believe.
Because humans have a powerful aversion to contradictions, the child's brain tries to resolve this discomfort. But when heavily invested in the need to belong, they do not reject the bad ideology—they distort the facts to fit it. They defend the lies completely, because admitting the ideology is wrong would force them to face the painful reality that they betrayed their own truth out of fear.
3. The Institutional Double Bind and Intense Intolerance
Every child in this environment is trapped in a sadistic double bind—a no-win scenario where they are told to be individuals but are forced into rigid tribal camps. They are damned if they speak up, and intellectually broken if they stay silent.
This is the exact root of the intense intolerance we see today. When a rational outsider points out a clear flaw in the ideology, the indoctrinated person cannot process it as a logical debate. Because they have been stripped of the skills for legitimate argumentation, and because the truth triggers all their buried, internalized shame, they experience the critique as a direct, terrifying attack on their safety. They lash out with defensive aggression, treating anyone using logic as an enemy who must be destroyed. (in some schools, logic is treated as colonial oppression when logic is the only tool to keep a person free from indoctrination and control...)
Breaking the Stick
When an abuser hands a child a stick and asks how they would like to be beaten, the solution is not to choose an option. The solution is to step forward and break the stick.
We must stop trying to find compromises within an abusive framework. A system that trains children to view rational thought as a threat to their survival is not failing to educate—it is succeeding in breaking them. To protect the mental capacity of the next generation, we must completely refuse to participate in these identity-sorting games, reject the false premises of the curriculum, and fiercely demand a return to objective truth, logic, and basic human dignity.
Grooming Minds | The Abuse of Child Indoctrination
It seems fairly recent that individuals need to choose a racial "identity." I'm working on a piece about this now. Some years ago, a young guy (a Millennial, I'm guessing) I met at an artists' colony was going on about how he didn't know how to "identify" given he was half Mexican and half Jewish. I was utterly perplexed. I'm a mix of a bunch of northern European and at the time thought I was also part Jewish. I identify as American.
When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, we'd ask "what are you" and it was usually a mix of things, so what if those things were all white? No one said, I don't know whether to identify as Irish or German.
This identity crap needs to be resolved by going back to being American. I do believe that globalism has caused it, along with people of color, who make a big deal out of race, in positions of power. There were a few non-white kids in my grade school and it would never have occurred to anyone to "identify" them as something other than American.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful piece. I also enjoyed perusing the Many Stories, One Nation website. I teach baccalaureate-level nursing students, so my population and content focus are very specific. However, the divisive DEI ideology is alive (rebranded as culturally responsive curriculum) and well in the EdD courses that I am taking. I am tired of reading about the "whiteness of education" and that I should speak to my students in the lingo spoken at home. I am tired of diverse educational strategies that focus only on the color of the students' skin (unless the skin is white) and not on the whole person. My teaching philosophy centers on teaching students HOW to think and NOT what to think. The Many Stories, One Nation curriculum focuses on critical thinking and analysis. I hope that it is implemented in ALL high schools. Also, I shared information about the curriculum in one of my EdD discussion posts that focuses on "all good culturally responsive curriculum creators use only the 8 concepts developed by New America." I bet I lose points! Again, thank you for such a thoughtful post and for helping to develop a truly "culturally responsive" curriculum.
" Race essentialism, mandatory affinity groups, and rigid oppressor/oppressed binaries do more than oversimplify the identity of multiracial children; they subtract from them. "
It subtracts from everyone...rigid oppressor/oppressed binaries are not beneficial to anyone except those who wish to sow animosity and hatred and get power from it. Mandatory affinity groups likewise. These all reduce people to members of an identity group which is expected to think/behave/be a certain way, to a stereotype. It certainly should not be getting taught. A shared cultural history can be recognized without these rigid (unsupported, we are not stereotypes or determined by our ancestry in key ways that are assumed in these groups) assumptions.
I work adjacent to the criminal justice system, and the antics of those who like to play colored triangle bingo are at times laughable or appalling. Many of them like to obsess over jail populations, specifically what percentage of those in jail are "people of color." Never mind that booking categories don't often exist for people of Middle Eastern origin, or that 'Hispanic' is considered an ethnicity by most software as opposed to a race (so it's not often recorded).
It's incredibly sad that we now apply race to so many discussions with the same zeal the National Socialists did some years ago. And it's even sadder that so many doing the applying can't seem to see that they're doing the same thing.
Thank you, Lisa.
I'm a member of a mixed identity family and an Ambassador for the Prohuman Foundation and I identify closely with your experience.
Our family members are Scots, African, Jamaican, Algonquin, French-German, and of various sexual persuasions.
Our kids' skin ranges in colour from freckly, to coffee-coloured, to ebony.
And yet they don't talk about identity. They talk about who gets on the bike, and "Will you dance with me daddy?"
In our society, our kids are not divided because of something intrinsic to them, they are divided because our adult society insists that they be.
We owe them better.
Great piece here Lisa, thank you.
Identity demands that focus on color, hair texture, sex, eye shape, and other immutable characteristics are always going to flatten and remove all the much more interesting and dynamic influences that allow the eventual emergence of our truest expression of authentic Individuality.
Unfortunately, the box checkers can only see exteriors, therefore missing entirely the much more relevant cultural influences and family belief systems that do the real work of socialized shaping of us humans.
Greg Thomas, who you mention in your article, often shares a story of a Black man in Britain who went on an ancestral pilgrimage of sorts to visit the village of his grandfather. Upon arriving he was disheartened to find that the people there treated him 100% as a British guy who happened to also be Black, whereas the cultural bent of the moment back in Britain was insisting that he was a Black man who happened to be British too.
What a powerful story that illustrates the exact cultural realities that dictate which parts of our identity are deemed to be adjectives and which are nouns!
The core issue with modern school indoctrination is that it weaponizes a child’s biological need to belong to systematically destroy their capacity for rational thought.
If you want to understand what is actually happening to children in classrooms right now, try this simple thought experiment.
Imagine a school where children are immediately divided into teams based on traits they cannot change. Day after day, they are drilled with a rigid ideology: One team is inherently bad, the other is inherently victimized. If you question this, you are a malicious person.
When a five-year-old enters this classroom, their survival depends entirely on being accepted by the group and the adults in charge. The system takes this deep, primal need to belong and turns it into a weapon. If a child notices a logical contradiction and asks a simple question, the hammer drops. They are not answered with logic; they are met with public shaming, isolation, and labels of "bias" or "denial."
To a child, the threat of exclusion from the tribe triggers raw survival panic. To escape that terror, the child's mind is forced to adapt. They learn that critical thinking leads to pain and exile, while blind compliance leads to safety and praise.
Before long, the act of reasoning itself becomes painful and terrifying. The child systematically trains their own brain to shut down awkward questions before they can even fully form. They trade their intelligence for a sense of safety, becoming psychological prisoners of the system.
This systematic grooming of minds relies on three destructive psychological mechanics that break a child's ability to function as a rational human being:
1. The Weaponization of Belonging and Infantilisation
True education builds a child's resourcefulness, encouraging them to test reality with fresh, unjaded eyes. This system practices infantilisation—actively sabotaging that development to keep children small, fearful, and dependent. By conditioning children to view every human interaction as a dangerous power struggle, schools engineer raw paranoia. When a child learns to treat their own logic as a dangerous "hidden defect," they lose the ability to think independently and become entirely dependent on institutional authorities to tell them what is safe to believe.
2. Cognitive Dissonance and Internalized Shame
Forcing a child to outwardly agree with ideas they know are contradictory creates a devastating psychological split known as cognitive dissonance. The child carries a deep, quiet shame for complying with things they do not genuinely believe.
Because humans have a powerful aversion to contradictions, the child's brain tries to resolve this discomfort. But when heavily invested in the need to belong, they do not reject the bad ideology—they distort the facts to fit it. They defend the lies completely, because admitting the ideology is wrong would force them to face the painful reality that they betrayed their own truth out of fear.
3. The Institutional Double Bind and Intense Intolerance
Every child in this environment is trapped in a sadistic double bind—a no-win scenario where they are told to be individuals but are forced into rigid tribal camps. They are damned if they speak up, and intellectually broken if they stay silent.
This is the exact root of the intense intolerance we see today. When a rational outsider points out a clear flaw in the ideology, the indoctrinated person cannot process it as a logical debate. Because they have been stripped of the skills for legitimate argumentation, and because the truth triggers all their buried, internalized shame, they experience the critique as a direct, terrifying attack on their safety. They lash out with defensive aggression, treating anyone using logic as an enemy who must be destroyed. (in some schools, logic is treated as colonial oppression when logic is the only tool to keep a person free from indoctrination and control...)
Breaking the Stick
When an abuser hands a child a stick and asks how they would like to be beaten, the solution is not to choose an option. The solution is to step forward and break the stick.
We must stop trying to find compromises within an abusive framework. A system that trains children to view rational thought as a threat to their survival is not failing to educate—it is succeeding in breaking them. To protect the mental capacity of the next generation, we must completely refuse to participate in these identity-sorting games, reject the false premises of the curriculum, and fiercely demand a return to objective truth, logic, and basic human dignity.
Grooming Minds | The Abuse of Child Indoctrination
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlbUw5hjeKI
Imaginary Defects
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqnCwp9Ia68
Infantilisation | A Regressive Abuse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c39F04inLJ0
Overcoming Malignant Shame
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMeehIpxH5k
Double Binds | Narcissistic ‘No-Win’ Mind Games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnSiJOOdo30
It seems fairly recent that individuals need to choose a racial "identity." I'm working on a piece about this now. Some years ago, a young guy (a Millennial, I'm guessing) I met at an artists' colony was going on about how he didn't know how to "identify" given he was half Mexican and half Jewish. I was utterly perplexed. I'm a mix of a bunch of northern European and at the time thought I was also part Jewish. I identify as American.
When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, we'd ask "what are you" and it was usually a mix of things, so what if those things were all white? No one said, I don't know whether to identify as Irish or German.
This identity crap needs to be resolved by going back to being American. I do believe that globalism has caused it, along with people of color, who make a big deal out of race, in positions of power. There were a few non-white kids in my grade school and it would never have occurred to anyone to "identify" them as something other than American.