Indoctrinating Our Children to Death: Government Schools’ War on Faith, Family & Freedom — And How to Stop It, by Alex Newman, Pinecrest, Florida; Liberty Sentinel Press, 2024, 237 pages, paperback.
Alex Newman has done it again. His new book is the must-have, must-read treatise on the urgent crisis in American education today. It is a worthy follow-up to his 2015 blockbuster Crimes of the Educators, co-authored with the late, great educator/historian Samuel Blumenfeld. In this new offering, Newman traces the genesis and vectors of the pathologies that are now infecting our schools, destroying our children, and devastating our society. He shows that the nonstop assaults we are facing — from transgender propaganda, Drag Queen story hours, and pornographic sex-ed for elementary school tots, to critical race theory and communist-socialist indoctrination for high school and college students — have been long in the making. Newman covers it all, connecting the dots of more than a century-and-a-half of subversion, from Robert Owen, Karl Marx, and Horace Mann, to John Dewey, the National Education Association, the Frankfurt School, the Rockefeller Foundation, Alfred Kinsey, Howard Zinn, the 1619 Project, and much more.
Welcome to the Asylum
As if any more evidence were needed, every day we see new proofs that our government educational establishment is hellbent on turning our public schools into insane asylums. What we euphemistically call our public school system is, in truth, a giant government indoctrination system that is involved in child abuse on a colossal scale and the brainwashing of our children with the most infernal ideas imaginable. The Libs of TikTok and other websites have reposted the shocking selfie videos of hundreds of LGBTQ school “teachers” who are boasting to their “communities” about how they are grooming elementary, junior high, and high school students through what they call “gender social transitioning.” The subversive “social transitioning,” by which they confuse our vulnerable children about sex and gender — almost always without the knowledge and consent of parents — is prelude to the irreparable “medical transitioning” involving hormonal “therapy” and surgical mutilation. The pink-blue-green-haired, tattooed, pierced “educators” laugh while bragging to their social media circles about how they are “regendering” boys as girls and girls as boys, giving them new names and pronouns.
In February 2024, news stories reported on the horrendous case of an immigrant family from India that fled from Olympia, Washington, back to India after a 3rd-grade teacher had “socially transitioned” their 10-year-old daughter (without the parents’ knowledge or consent), giving her a boy’s name and pronouns, causing the young girl tremendous psychological harm and confusion. The Olympia school district is but one of more than 1,000 districts that have adopted secrecy policies for kids with “gender dysphoria” so that parents do not find out that their sons and daughters are being recruited into the transgender ranks — until it’s too late. According to the list compiled by the parental rights group Parents Defending Education, 1,058 public school districts governing more than 18,000 schools and nearly 11 million students are now engaged in this perverse attack on parental rights and pushing this diabolical disorientation of the minds and souls of our children and the mutilation of their bodies! Our society, our nation, will not survive if this demonic attack on our families is allowed to continue. Across the country, parents are filing lawsuits against school districts in desperate attempts to halt the madness.
How did we come to this? The United States spends more on education (an average of $19,380 per pupil in 2023) than any other nation, except for tiny, rich Luxembourg. Yet, what are the American taxpayers getting for this exorbitant outlay? A huge percentage of our children are functionally illiterate and woefully deficient in all other subject areas by every measurement of academic achievement. The abysmal trend of our educational decline has continued unabated year after year, decade after decade, with no end in sight, no matter how much money we throw at it. Our students are way behind the children of other nations in reading, math, science, and other basics. Our schools have dumped the traditional 3Rs (Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic) for the new woke 3Rs of environmental dogma (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) and leftist psychobabble (Rights, Respect, and Responsibility).
To this ludicrousness are added still more three-letter indoctrination programs: DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), ESG (environment, social, and governance), CRT (critical race theory), and SEL (social and emotional learning). Is it any wonder that millions of our students do not know how to read, write, or do basic math, but they know that they have been misgendered, that socialism is good, and that America is systemically racist? We are teetering on the edge of the abyss — and millions of our children have already been pushed over the edge.
Again, how did we get to this point? And, more importantly, what do we do now? How do we get out of this terrible mess? Alex Newman provides answers. In this slim volume (237 pages), Newman masterfully provides readers with a superbly condensed history of the corrosive influences of communist and socialist subversives in the 19th and 20th centuries and the individuals and organizations in our own time that have produced our public school disaster. His 22 chapters were originally written as a series of articles on education for The Epoch Times. It was a phenomenal series, and we are fortunate to have the articles collected now and presented in book form.
Perhaps the best way to present an idea of the breadth and depth of the subject matter Newman covers is to simply list his chapter titles, which we do herewith:
Chapter 1: The Genesis of Public Schools: Collectivism and Failure
Chapter 2: How Horace Mann Worked to Destroy Traditional Education — and America
Chapter 3: How John Dewey Used Public ‘Education’ to Subvert Liberty
Chapter 4: John Dewey’s Public Schools Replaced Christianity With Collectivist Humanism
Chapter 5: Socialists Used Public Schools to Destroy Literacy in America
Chapter 6: Frankfurt School Weaponized US Education Against Civilization
Chapter 7: Big Foundations Unleashed Collectivist ‘Revolution’ via US Schools
Chapter 8: How Socialists Used Teachers Unions Such as the NEA to Destroy Education
Chapter 9: UNESCO: Indoctrinating Humanity With Collectivist ‘Education’
Chapter 10: Rise of ‘Fed Ed’ Accelerated Demise of Real Education
Chapter 11: Common Core, Still in Place, Nationalized Educational Quackery
Chapter 12: Big Brother Schools Using Big Data to Manipulate and Spy on Kids
Chapter 13: The Sordid History and Deadly Consequences of ‘Sex Ed’ at School
Chapter 14: Homeschooling Revolution Gets Coronavirus Boost
Chapter 15: Historic Crossroads for Private Education: Boom or Bust?
Chapter 16: Trading Academics for Far-Left ‘Social-Emotional Learning’
Chapter 17: Schools Using Fake ‘History’ to Kill America
Chapter 18: CCP Virus Ushers In Brave New World of Techno-Utopian ‘Education’
Chapter 19: Echoes of Mao: Weaponizing Schools With ‘Critical Race Theory’
Chapter 20: The Totalitarian Agenda Behind LGBT Sex-Ed Revolution at School
Chapter 21: Pushing Parents Out, Biden Administration Further Weaponizes ‘Education’
Chapter 22: The Schools Are on Fire; Time to Get the Children Out
As the title of his book states, Newman is not only taking aim at and exposing the forces responsible for the educational calamity we face, but is also offering solutions. One thing is certain, however: His solutions do not include falling for the standard “reform” tricks that have beguiled so many conservatives so many times in the past. When backed into a corner by angry parents and taxpayers, the educrats and their bought-and-paid-for politicians will always promise another round of “reform.” But, like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, their promises invariably are charades, deceitful tricks. Notwithstanding, there are always plenty of Charlie Browns ready to fall for the perennial reform ruse.
Those who are old enough may remember the much-heralded 1983 report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, published during the Reagan administration by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. That was more than 40 years ago. The report on America’s appalling educational decline caused much handwringing and spawned a plethora of futile reform and pseudo-reform efforts. Why futile? Because the government school system is irreformable. As Newman demonstrates in his first three chapters, the government-controlled indoctrination system (commonly called “public schools”) was the result of a revolutionary drive begun nearly 200 years ago by self-avowed communist and socialist revolutionaries such as Robert Owen, Fanny Wright, Orestes Brownson, Horace Mann, and others.
“The great object was to get rid of Christianity,” said Brownson, after breaking with his communist comrades and becoming a Christian. The plan, he explained, was to gain first state, and then national, control over education, and to compel parents to place their children in these statist schools. He explained that the network of activists pushing this scheme comprised a secret society modeled after the Carbonari, the militantly anti-Christian, Masonic organization that at the time was engaged in assassinations and stirring up wars, revolts, and chaos throughout Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. Horace Mann and his fellow revolutionaries had the same object in mind as their Carbonari confreres, though they adopted a more “peaceful” method of takeover by patient gradualism, infiltration, propaganda, and brainwashing. Today, after 10 generations of this subversive process, we have arrived at a time when most Americans believe that government-run education is something “that always was and always will be.” Too many of our fellow citizens are imprisoned inside a mental trap that won’t allow them to see the obvious. Too many are placing their hopes in new public school “reform” efforts.
In response to the dire warnings of A Nation at Risk, this magazine predicted that, despite the good intentions of many would-be reformers, most if not all of these efforts were doomed to fail. In a September 1986 cover story titled “Separation of School and State,” this writer proposed that any sober reflection on the facts and dangerous trends should lead to the conclusion that we, as a nation, headed down a treacherous road long ago when we fell for the scheme of government indoctrination in place of true education. The real solution then is not to double down. Dump more money and energy into “public school reform”? Really? And expect something different from the debacles that have come out of all previous reforms?
Save the Children
“The key question, then, is what to do,” Newman writes. “For parents,” he continues, “the answer should be obvious by now: It’s time to remove your children from these abusive environments and get them a real education, either at home or in a high-quality private or Christian school. All of the data shows home-educated children are running circles around their government-‘educated’ peers on everything from academics and socialization to careers and tolerance.”
“The time has come to treat this situation like the deadly threat that it is,” says Newman. “If you still have children in a public school, or if you know anyone with children trapped inside, act like the building is on fire — because it is! In fact, it’s much worse than that.” A fire can physically harm or kill your child, which, of course, would be terrible; but even worse is that “the schools are destroying children mentally, emotionally, academically, spiritually, culturally, morally, and more.”
“At this point, it is no longer debatable: The public school system is openly hostile to Christianity — and to Christians,” Newman asserts. “It is based on a worldview and theological perspective that are not just wrong but deadly, as the fruit and devastation piling up all around the United States show clearly.”
“What America needs isn’t more ‘conservatives’ on impotent ‘school boards,’ though there’s no harm in running for school board once one’s own children are safely out of the system,” he argues. “What’s really needed is to rip the destructive government-school monopoly out by the roots and start again from scratch.”
Taking your children out of the toxic government school system is the first essential step. When we proposed this decades ago, it was considered a wackadoodle idea even by many conservatives. Not so anymore. Defunding and dismantling our statist school system (beginning with the federal Department of Education) is the next essential step. And it is an idea whose time has come.
“Abolishing government indoctrination centers wouldn’t undermine education one bit, any more than abolishing collective agriculture in the Soviet Union ended farming or food production. It would make it drastically better,” Newman rightly notes.
“For a century, conservatives, Christians, and those who love America have been fighting a losing battle against the weaponization of government ‘education.’ No matter how many millions of dollars are wasted in the fight, the situation keeps getting worse. It’s time to stop playing a rigged game on the education establishment’s battlefield using its rules. American parents should flee the system and build parallel institutions like their country and their liberty depend on it — because they do.”
Alex Newman practices what he preaches. Besides his busy schedule as an author, correspondent, podcaster, and speaker, he and his wife, Maria Kristina, homeschool their five children. He has traveled extensively throughout the nation spreading this vital freedom message on his “Save Our Children” speaking tours and in media interviews.
Indoctrinating Our Children to Death is the most important book available today on the culture war and family survival. Every parent, grandparent, teacher, pastor, school administrator, school board member, state legislator, and taxpayer who is genuinely alarmed over the state of our schools needs the information in it to rescue our children and save our nation. Please get it, read it, share it, quote it, promote it, and distribute it.
