In New York City, three Democratic Socialists of America members recently won their primaries, pushing out two longtime incumbent Democrats. Far-left influencer Hasan Piker celebrated the victories by declaring, “It’s the decade of socialism. It’s coming to a neighborhood near you.”
Piker has called the Republican Party the world’s “biggest terrorist” and recently said Israel, in its current form, “does not have a right to exist.”
Far-left activists are using the education system to undermine Western institutions and advance a fundamentally different political vision.
Socialist and neo-communist partisans such as Piker and the DSA are gaining momentum in major cities. Many Americans do not realize that these far-left “people’s movements” often are not grassroots uprisings at all. They are driven by billionaire-funded activist organizations and progressives with elite academic backgrounds.
How did an anti-Western ideology gain such influence, especially among young people?
Part of the answer lies in the education system.
The radical left has turned American children, teachers, and K-12 schools into pieces of a political apparatus designed to build immediate and long-term power. From colleges of education to preschool lessons to youth activism, classrooms are increasingly used to advance an intentionally vague socialist “political revolution.”
The training begins before teachers ever enter the classroom.
Many colleges of education now treat anti-racism and social justice activism as core elements in the training of future and current educators. Schools of higher education also promote critical pedagogy as a “best practice.” That philosophy, rooted in cultural Marxism, treats teaching as inherently political and justifies far-left activism and diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout the education system as necessary tools to overcome supposed oppression.
What is taught in colleges of education never stays there.
The New York State Education Department’s Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework promotes critical pedagogy to help dismantle “systems of biases and inequities rooted in our country’s history, culture, and institutions.”
New York City schools have adopted this strategy. A key component is “critical consciousness,” or what many would call a woke mindset. This approach seeks to “identify and interrupt policies and practices that center on historically advantaged social/cultural groups.”
In other words, New York City teachers are expected to incorporate far-left political orthodoxy into teaching methods, curriculum development, lesson planning, and classroom activities.
RELATED: Who wants to eat a trillionaire?
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images
New York is not alone.
In Joliet Public Schools in Illinois, the district’s “Teacher Evaluation Framework” says contracted staff can receive an “excellent” mark if they demonstrate critical consciousness in classroom interactions and performance.
Once these abstract concepts reach the classroom, they are woven into curricula such as ethnic studies, conditioning children to see society almost exclusively through the lens of oppressor and oppressed. Sold to school boards, parents, and communities as the study of history and culture, ethnic studies often functions as an activist training program rooted in critical pedagogy.
Some students are exposed to this framework as early as preschool. They are not merely taught to view the world through an anti-Western political lens. They are also encouraged, and in some cases required, to engage in activism or “action research” aimed at dismantling “systems of oppression” such as capitalism and the “patriarchy.”
Those seeds of politicization bore fruit last spring when schools across the country dealt with hundreds of student walkouts in support of far-left political causes and a “political revolution.”
These youth protests were not fully organic. They were often organized, promoted, or funded by activist organizations such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Sunrise Movement, and teachers’ unions.
The most extreme example came from Chicago Public Schools, which gave in to the Chicago Teachers Union’s demand to use students and district resources for its May Day mass mobilization effort.
Regardless of political affiliation, Americans who care about the constitutional republic should recognize what is happening. Far-left activists are using the education system to undermine Western institutions and advance a fundamentally different political vision.
Thomas Paine wrote 250 years ago that “tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” If this republic is to endure, it will require the same love of liberty and willingness to defend it that animated previous generations.
American children deserve the same opportunity for self-government enjoyed by those who came before them. That’s why the corruption of the education system in service of anti-Western ideology and political activism must end.
