Indoctrinating Our Children to Death

“The great object was to get rid of Christianity.” Brownson’s admission sets the stage for Indoctrinating Our Children to Death, where Alex Newman documents how government schooling became the preferred instrument for remaking belief, family, and citizenship. He begins where the records point: Robert Owen’s failed New Harmony experiment, the transfer of Owen’s ideas to Prussia, and the birth of age-graded, state-directed schools built to form character for the collective. From there he follows the American adoption — first in Massachusetts under Horace Mann, then nationwide — until the system most parents now assume is “normal” had replaced the older American pattern of local, faith-anchored learning.

Newman expertly moves through the evidence. He cites Owen’s own essays on “the formation of character,” Dewey’s program for social reconstruction, and Orestes Brownson’s testimony after his turnabout. He tracks the money and leverage of major foundations, the rise of “Fed Ed,” and the standards regimes — including Common Core — that nationalized mediocrity while centralizing control. He shows how teachers unions such as the NEA gained outsized influence, how the Frankfurt School’s ideas filtered into classrooms, and how UNESCO framed “global citizenship” as a schooling goal. Because ideas have consequences, he links these moves to measurable declines in literacy and civic understanding.

The analysis continues in the present tense. Chapters take up the use of big-data systems to profile students, the repackaging of Critical Race Theory, and the trade of academics for social-emotional conditioning. Newman also documents the long arc of sex education — from SIECUS to its modern heirs — and how it displaced Christian anthropology with a rival creed. He notes the COVID-era acceleration of screens and surveillance, which turned many classrooms into test beds for remote management. Yet he also records a countertrend: the homeschooling surge, renewed interest in private education, and congregations revisiting their duty to build schools that teach truth and cultivate virtue.

Who should read this? Parents weighing an exit. Pastors counseling families. School-board members and legislators facing policy fights. Teachers ready to rebuild. Indoctrinating Our Children to Death presses the case now because the system is still shaping souls every weekday. Read to recognize the apparatus and recover an older American model of learning, and then with renewed hope, act. (2024, 237pp, pb)