https://www.thefp.com/p/how-american-schools-indoctrinate-kids?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
If you read The Free Press, you know that over the last decade, an illiberal ideology that goes by various names—Critical Race Theory; Critical Social Justice—has transformed key institutions of American life. It is remaking the law, Hollywood, medicine, higher education, psychology, and more.
No area, however, is more important than our schools, which shape the minds of future citizens. And across the country, teachers are now engaged in the wholesale indoctrination of their pupils.
The Evanston–Skokie School District teaches K–3 students to “break the binary” of gender. Seattle Public Schools tell teachers that the education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children, while a Cupertino, California elementary school forces third-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” In Portland, K–5 students are taught to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and explore the “infinite gender spectrum.” And thousands of similar examples, perhaps in your own community.
Yet many refute the claim that this ideological transformation is happening at all. Which is why we thought it was crucial to ground the anecdotes that sometimes make headlines in representative, large-scale data. We wanted to understand the impact that this reprogramming is having on young people’s ideas about race, gender, identity and more.
A recent survey of 1,500 Americans aged 18–20 that I conducted with Zach Goldberg for the Manhattan Institute proves just how widespread and pernicious this issue has become. It has implications that should concern anyone who cares about open inquiry and free speech.
We asked a random national sample of 18- to 20-year-olds whether they had heard (from an adult in school) of pro–Critical Race Theory (CRT) concepts such as “white privilege” or “systemic racism” as well as radical gender concepts such as the idea that gender is separate from biological sex. An astounding 90 percent had been exposed to CRT and 74 percent to radical gender concepts at school. In 7 of 10 cases these beliefs were presented as fact, or as the only respectable view to hold.
Why does this matter? Increasingly, evidence is pouring in that young people are intolerant of opposing views.
For instance, nearly 70 percent of undergraduates polled in a 2021 study said that if “a professor says something students find offensive,” they should be reported to the university. The massive Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveys of 2020–2022 find that 65 to 85 percent of American undergraduates believe universities should not permit speakers on campus who argue that some transgender people have a mental disorder, BLM is a hate group, or abortion should be illegal.
When compared to older age groups, young people are far more intolerant, even when taking their politics into consideration. As I show in this report, over two-thirds of 18- to 25-year-olds think Google was right to fire programmer James Damore in 2017 for raising evidence-based questions in an internal memo about the firm’s gender equity policy. This compares to just 36 percent of those over 50 who backed Damore’s termination. Among liberals, I found that 82 percent of 18–25-year-olds support his firing while a much lower 57 percent of liberals over 50 do.
Not only are educated young people intolerant of opposing ideas, they are increasingly unwilling to date or befriend Republicans. According to original data that I analyzed from FIRE’s 2020 survey, just 7 percent of female and 19 percent of male college students who are not Republican would feel comfortable dating a Trump supporter.
