In the ongoing war for the hearts and minds of America’s children, the left has unveiled its newest and most brazen weapon yet: Parents are the “oppressors” and children must be “liberated” from the “oppression.”
Under the banner of “ethnic studies” and the new buzzword “adultism,” teacher training programs and classroom curricula across more than 22 states are systematically teaching that parental authority is a form of oppression—tyranny, fascism, even.
Loving mothers and fathers who set boundaries on clothing, relationships, sexual activity, or medical decisions involving their own children are literally being cast as oppressors. In typical Marxist style, the “oppressed” — the children — are being groomed to rebel.
This is not education, of course. It is psychological warfare designed to drive a wedge between children and the parents God gave them.
PragerU CEO Marissa Streit is one of the prominent voices sounding the alarm after examining the materials. “They have to break the bond between a child and the parent,” she explained. “They have to break the bond between a parent and the community.”
“By creating an entire chaotic environment, you create an environment of collective grievance where the individual feels helpless and hopeless,” she added. “Then a new form of government comes out and says, ‘Well, you can’t trust anybody else, so therefore put your trust in us.’ And that is always what socialists have done.”
In teacher trainings now being exposed, “adultism” is presented as a force of oppression. As Streit explained, when an adult behaves like an adult — telling a child not to dress provocatively, not to engage in sex at a young age, or not to pursue experimental gender interventions — the parent is supposedly committing adultism.
One passage from the training text states: “Adultism teaches us that adults have the power and the right to decide what young people’s boundaries should be.” The clear implication is that this power and right must be rejected.
Central to this push is the teacher training manual Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators, published by the radical AK Press. It promotes anti-capitalism, Critical Race Theory, and the explicit rejection of adult authority.
Ethnic studies modules, Streit notes, simply repackage the discredited doctrines of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI), Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), and Critical Race Theory (CRT) to advance the same Marxist ideals under a new label.
Workshops have already sparked controversy even in places like San Francisco. The far-left “education” establishment there is using materials claiming that systemic power dynamics make the relationship between students and educators inherently oppressive—and by extension, the parent-child relationship as well.
This is no isolated excess. It is the logical next step in a decades-long campaign to weaponize government schools against the family, the Christian faith, and the free society those institutions undergird.
As I have documented for years—from Crimes of the Educators with the late education legend Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld to the more recent Woke and Weaponized with Classical Conversations CEO Robert Bortins—the architects of American public education never intended to produce literate, independent citizens rooted in truth. Just the opposite.
It began with the utopian socialist and necromancer Robert Owen, who sought to free children from the “monstrous evils” of private property, Christianity, and the traditional family. That took root in Prussia, before being brought back to America by Horace Mann.
The system they created was eventually further weaponized by Soviet Union aficionado John Dewey and his sugar daddy John D. Rockefeller to advance cultural Marxism and the false religion of “humanism,” as Dewey and friends called it.
But the goal has always been the same: capture the children, dumb them down as quickly as possible, break their attachment to parents and Biblical morality, and remake society in a collectivist image. The fruit is now clear to see.
Of course, Critical Race Theory, which invaded schools over the last decade, was never about history or racial justice. It was about teaching children to view the world through the oppressor-oppressed lens of Marxist class struggle, merely swapping economic class for race.
Now “adultism” applies the same toxic framework to the most fundamental human relationship: the nuclear family, designed by the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth to be the basic building block of society.
In the view of critical theorists, the nuclear family must be destabilized because it is the primary transmitter of values, faith, and resistance to totalitarian control. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels both understood this; the Communist Manifesto openly targeted the family.
Modern Democratic Socialists of America activists understand it too. As PragerU’s Streit observed, the ultimate aim is the radical transformation of America—dismantling institutions, creating chaos and collective grievance, then offering the state as the sole source of trust and authority.
Teachers’ unions fighting parental notification laws on gender issues are not defending children; they are advancing the same agenda. The effort to sideline and demonize parents while promoting government as the replacement has dominated teachers’ unions for decades.
This ideology stands in direct, irreconcilable conflict with biblical and traditional American values. Scripture is unambiguous: parents, not the state or activist educators, bear the primary responsibility for raising children.
Parents have an obligation to bring up their children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, explain the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 6:4 and Moses in Deuteronomy 6 and 11, among countless other biblical texts. Children, meanwhile, are repeatedly commanded to honor their father and mother.
Indeed, the family is the first and most important government ordained by God. Parental authority is not oppression; it is a sacred trust and a bulwark against chaos.
Traditional Western civilization — and all civilized societies — recognize that children are not autonomous agents of revolution but immature souls requiring guidance, protection, and moral formation. To label that guidance “tyranny” is to invert the created order and echo the serpent’s ancient lie: you shall be as gods, deciding good and evil for yourselves.
Taxpayers should never be forced to fund this evil. Government “education” already consumes hundreds of billions annually while producing declining academic results and rising rates of anxiety, confusion, and alienation.
Channeling those dollars into materials that teach children their parents are the enemy is an outrage of the highest order. It is child abuse masquerading as pedagogy. School boards, state legislatures, and Congress must defund every program, workshop, and curriculum that promotes “adultism,” abolitionist education, or any variant of the oppressor-oppressed indoctrination.
Parents who discover this poison in their districts should demand its immediate removal and hold officials accountable at the ballot box. Lawsuits should be flying, too.
Most importantly, American parents must protect their children. The government school system has become the primary delivery mechanism for indoctrination of the next generation into ideologies hostile to faith, family, and freedom.
Alternatives exist—classical Christian education, homeschooling, co-ops, and online schools such as FreedomProject Academy and countless other options are committed to truth rather than transformation. The time for polite concern has passed.
This is not a debate over pedagogy. It is a battle for the soul of the next generation. Refuse to surrender your children to those who call biblical authority tyranny. Remove them from the influence of these programs, reclaim your God-given role, and raise sons and daughters who know the difference between liberation and bondage. The future of the republic depends on it.
