Whose Children Are They?

New Documentary Alerts Parents to Sexual Grooming and Propaganda in U.S. Education

To the surprise of none, Russia has recently launched a targeted propaganda campaign, aimed at its youngest citizens. By way of its Ministry of Education, curated in a tidy classroom lesson plan entitled, “The defenders of peace,” Russian children are learning how their military is engaging not in a war with Ukraine, but rather in a “liberation mission.”

Former Soviet Defense Intelligence Agency officer Rebekah Koffler explained how children are learning that their heroic leaders are committed to protecting “the people of Donbas from genocide,” and that despite the images of tanks and explosions, “this is a peacekeeping mission.”

Those of us in the U.S. should naturally be appalled at this disinformation campaign lobbed at such young people. Yet Koffler explains that the purpose of education in the former U.S.S.R. was “to indoctrinate children into ‘Soviet types.’” In recounting her own experience with the Soviet education system, she added, “basically throughout my childhood, beginning in kindergarten ... all the way up to college, “The indoctrination [was] just always present.” Koffler is not the first to report these nefarious goals in Soviet education. Soviet dissident Olga Rusanova told Rod Dreher that as a student under totalitarian rule, her essays always had to affirm a communist point of view; free thinking was not encouraged.[1]

We should not naïvely breathe a sigh of relief that our own schools do not engage in such blatant propagandizing. The Prussian education model used for managing the masses in the totalitarian states has, in the words of John Taylor Gatto, “entrenched itself deep into the bowels of American institutional schooling.”[2] The award-winning[3] New York City school teacher and author of several books on modern education says the same Prussian system guiding U.S.S.R. teaching practices informs institutionalized schooling in the U.S.

In The Underground History of American Public Education, Gatto explains that the Prussian system boasted producing not merely an obedient military and a trained workforce, but “citizens who thought alike on most issues,” demonstrating “national uniformity in thought, word, and deed.”

Politicians, special interest groups, and big businesses all recognize the power of the education system for imparting ideas and inculcating values. And a lot can be inculcated when you have a captive audience in a confined classroom seven and a half hours a day, five days a week, over the course of ten months under the “authority” the institution brings. Such an arrangement has been nothing short of a golden goose for those wishing to advance the creeds of Critical Race Theory (CRT), Black Lives Matter, and the LGBTQ+ agenda (under the guise of comprehensive sex education) in classrooms across the country.

These moves might have slipped under the radar of watchful parents had not the covid lockdowns given parents a front-row seat to their children’s curricula. The consequence of this? Parents began to see first-hand the at-times pornographic and propaganda-laden materials being presented to their children.

Colorado parent Deborah Flora said that this new awareness has resulted in new activism on the part of both parents and brave teachers. Flora founded Parents United America over growing concern that parents' rights over their children’s education are being undermined. This is especially evident in news footage of parents being arrested at school board meetings for opposing CRT, being interrupted, shouted down, or having their mics cut while reading pornographic material from their children’s schoolbooks, or even being tagged as “extremist hate organizations” “equivalent to … domestic terrorism” by our own justice department.

Flora and California public school teacher Rebecca Friedrichs have produced a documentary asking, Whose Children Are They? to inform the rest of the nation about objectionable content in U.S. public school curricula.

Viewers will be alarmed at the explicit sexual content in elementary school curricula – against the wishes of parents and many teachers. In interviews with distinguished professors, teachers, parents, and students, viewers will see how antiracist dogma advanced by CRT leaves no winners, just miserable losers, dispirited students, and fractured relationships. Not only are parents’ authority being undermined, their children’s very sexual identities and moral formation are under threat.

While Russian parents sadly have little constitutional framework for resisting their state’s propaganda campaigns, American parents have both philosophical and constitutional grounds for doing so. The fight to recoup parent’s rights starts with becoming informed. Read your children’s materials, watch the videos they are assigned, and participate in school board meetings. And if your state does not have any educational transparency laws, start demanding them. Finally, know and understand that God has ordained parents as the guardians over the well-being and moral formation of their own children – not the state.

Also, make a note to see Whose Children Are They? And connect with other concerned parents in your community.

Whose Children Are They? will be showing next Monday, March 14^th, in theaters across the country. Click here for theaters and showtimes.