Kids Must Cry: Government schools have become day camps for indoctrinating a woke cadre.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education awarded a coveted blue ribbon of excellence to Rota Elementary School, which serves children of military service members abroad in Spain. The DOE singled out Rota’s commitment to “families and educators work[ing] together in partnership.” But the “partnership” between teachers and parents that the DOE praises has a weird twist, as it appears to be rooted in keeping parents in the dark about classroom activities.

According to Rota teacher Genevieve Chavez, elementary school is the “ideal time” to introduce children to gender identity ideology because “kids as young as four years old are already starting to develop a stable understanding of their gender identity.” And once they hit middle school, according to Chavez, Rota will keep students’ alternative gender identities secret from their “unsafe” parents. So much for “families and educators work[ing] together in partnership.”

Chavez’s comments were part of the Department of Defense Education Activity’s (DoDEA) 2021 “Equity and Access Summit” video, which was the basis for Claremont’s recent report “Grooming Future Revolutionaries: Woke Indoctrination at K-12 Schools on America’s Military Bases.” The report covered how schools serving children of service members are peddling critical race theory, white-shaming, queer theory, and leftist activism to children. After the report was published, the videos were hidden from public view. But one aspect of DoDEA’s “Equity” agenda deserves further emphasis: the bizarre cruelty of the pedagogical practices that estrange children from their parents.

One practice highlighted in the conference was the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Let’s Talk!” toolkit, which encourages “critical conversations” that promote “intersectionality” and discuss “the ways that injustice affects our lives and society.” The “Let’s Talk!” toolkit prepares teachers for the inevitable moment when this exercise makes their students break down and cry. Normal pedagogical practice in America post-Dewey tends to avoid lesson plans that predictably result in tears.

But not under an “Equity” framework. Just as military bootcamps promise to break down recruits’ individuality to rebuild them as members of a corps, “Equity” pedagogy will decompose a student’s worldview to impose a new one. The Equity and Access Summit suggests that students and teachers can swear an oath to their new god. “My name is ____,” the program proposes, “and I have been impacted by systemic discrimination in society, and am committed to a lifelong journey of dismantling my own bias(es). I strive to thrive in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion every day!”