Children are being harmed by radical Marxist theory in America’s public education, and the sooner this is realized, the sooner America will have a chance to reclaim a future, according to Liz Wheeler, host of The Liz Wheeler Show and author of the book “Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Children.”
Ms. Wheeler, in an interview to EpochTV’s American Thought Leaders, said some people may think that talking about there being a Marxist influence behind America’s education system is similar to an insult.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, parents saw a glimpse of what policy culture is driving their children’s education. They were able to see the content of schools’ online courses when their children were learning from home, and saw the politicized emphasis on topics like critical race theory, transgender ideology, and moral relativism, being instilled in children’s minds, according to Ms. Wheeler.
Capturing the Children
She said that in the past century, the left has “tried to reengineer our society and has been pretty successful at it,” as they have captured the foundational institutions of the media, education, many religions, and the law, which they have used to attack the nuclear family.“There is one element of the nuclear family left standing, children, which maybe explains why the left is going after these children,” Ms. Wheeler said.
Ms. Wheeler names the people and the institutions behind these attacks on America’s children in her book, and has found that all these people are either self-avowed Marxists or people who have embraced “an obvious Marxist ideology.”
“If we refuse to acknowledge who these people are and what ideology they espouse, then we won’t fight effectively against them, and therefore we won’t win,” Ms. Wheeler said, adding that she wrote the book for the sake of the children’s individual souls but also for America, “if we surrender our children to the left, our nation is done.”
Paulo Freire
Ms. Wheeler criticizes the Republican Party for not fighting back against the left’s pushing its ideology to transform American society.“We have to ask ourselves, ‘Who is our most effective fighting partner?’ And if that effective fighting partner is the Republican party since the Democrats have embraced what I would describe as evil, we have to be part of holding the Republican Party accountable for how they fighting,” she said.
She said that many Republican thought leaders cannot give a definition of “woke” culture. She has been able to trace back woke ideology’s origins to a Brazilian “self-avowed Marxist” and educational theorist named Paulo Freire, author of the book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” who “did not believe in objective reality, in objective truth.”
Mr. Freire thought that children should look at education through critical consciousness, which is viewing the world through critical Marxism, Ms. Wheeler said. Critical Marxism, in its turn, is reducing everything in the world to being either oppressed or an oppressor, or the classic Marxist dialectics.
Alan Charles Kors, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, said that there are three books that have had the deepest influence on the humanities in the United States; they are Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
Mr. Freire’s book doesn’t focus on any specific educational problems, but rather is “a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies,” as described by City Journal’s Stern. The work does no more than repeat the Marxist view that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the oppressor and the oppressed. The oppressed should, then, reject their education, be awakened to their miserable circumstances, and be spurred to rebellion.
“Critical consciousness, this viewing the world through a Marxist lens, is exactly what wokeness is,” she said, and it is what America’s children are being taught.
