In a recent piece for The Atlantic, the progressive but frequently heterodox writer Caitlin Flanagan channeled her inner Marxist for an attack on American private schools. Condemning the “elite” institutions that offer “a literal embarrassment of riches” to a select few, Flanagan suggested that the nation’s lawmakers might reconsider policies that allow schools like Andover and Exeter to amass tax-free fortunes. Response from the right was predictably swift. Writing at National Review Online, Daniel Buck bemoaned Flanagan’s “caricature” of private schools and her strategic silence regarding “the state of public education.” The often feisty Houston Courant dismissed Flanagan’s work as a “journalistic failure” that “derides [private] academies not for their faults but for their merits.” Among parents in my own circle, reaction to Flanagan’s piece was at once more personal and more anguished. If the Left was renewing its assault on public-school alternatives, what might become of the private religious academies upon which so many of our families depend?

Like many fears concerning progressive overreach, the anxiety of these parents arises from a shared conviction that the nation’s religious schools are operating as intended right now and ought not to be disturbed by agents of the state. Having attended, taught at, or sent my own children to such institutions for the better part of two decades, I wholeheartedly concur. Yet private religious institutions, even at their most benevolent, are imperfect friends to conservative families. Though they eschew the leftist indoctrination practiced by public schools and the “elite” academies that Flanagan despises, they decidedly don’t relieve parents of the obligation to investigate, to oversee, and to take ultimate responsibility for our children’s education.

To illustrate this point, I will refer in this article to three “current events” readings that were recently used in my nine-year-old daughter’s Christian classroom. Together, they demonstrate the extent to which even well-meaning institutions can inadvertently propagandize for the Left. If what follows seems to owe something to the first chapter of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, the resemblance is intentional. Lewis begins that work with the characteristically restrained assertion “I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text books.” If anything, given the ideological homogeneity of America’s curriculum designers, the matter is even more pressing on this side of the Atlantic today.

The first assignment in question is the most aggressive and therefore the least likely to slip by attentive parents. “On the March,” a story by Brian McGrath in Time for Kids magazine, provides an account of the summer rallies that brought thousands of anti-racism protesters to Washington and other cities. The article begins innocently enough, with a contextualizing reference to George Floyd and an anodyne quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s granddaughter. Yet the author soon proves unable to resist peppering this stew with a dash of progressive commentary. Citing the (presumably universal) “unjust treatment of Black people,” McGrath notes that children “continue to be leaders in the fight for social justice” and repeats uncritically a Minnesota mother’s remark that “we want our daughters to be aware of the privilege they carry [as white people].” (The bracketed text appears in the article.) Elsewhere in the piece, and consistently, McGrath equates progressive activism with courage, sharing approvingly the story of a ten-year-old who led a crowd in a chant of “Black lives matter” and passing along that child’s contention that “even though you’re little, you can still be brave.”

That some of these ideas will fly over the heads of preadolescent readers is a near certainty. Nevertheless, let us pause to consider the appalling irresponsibility of offering a string of unfalsifiable racialist abstractions to fourth-graders. It is, of course, safe to assume that children who were sentient during the summer of 2020 overheard adult discussions of bigotry, protest, and the death of George Floyd. What they ought not to hear is a one-sided repackaging of BLM talking points, the rhetorical excesses and flawed presuppositions of which they are in no position to interrogate. To examine contemporary race relations in the elementary classroom is defensible, if usually unwise. To suggest that some children owe an unpayable debt on the basis of their skin color, or that left-wing agitation is necessarily heroic, is foolish almost to the point of wickedness.

The second assignment in question comes from the educational website DOGO News and is, at first glance, the kind of dispassionate inauguration report that might accompany any new presidential administration. Titled “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Sworn In as President and Vice President of the United States of America,” the article, by editor in chief Meera Dolasia, opens with a boilerplate lede introducing young readers to the 2020 electoral victors. Though my own preference would be to treat Harris’s race and sex as entirely unremarkable facts, few could fault Dolasia for noting, in paragraph one, that the Californian is “the first woman and first person of color to hold the country’s second-highest office.” Similarly, while Dolasia’s use of the Biden-Harris slogan “Build Back Better” without quotation marks is unseemly, the error, committed later in the article, is by no means fatal.

Rather, Dolasia’s piece disqualifies itself with a pronouncement that is related to its Harris commentary but considerably more obnoxious. During the inauguration ceremony, students learn, the Pledge of Allegiance was recited by one Andrea Hall, “the first African American female captain of the Fire-Rescue Department in South Fulton, Georgia.” Never mind that this instance of race-and-gender scorekeeping is ridiculously low-stakes. (I was the first white man to try every menu item at Reggie’s BBQ in Jackson, Tenn. No plaque need be erected.) The truly damaging idea is the notion that no human endeavor of any kind is beneath the notice of the identity sleuths. For the Christian, this way of thinking directly contradicts Paul’s assertion that “there is neither Jew nor Greek . . . in Christ Jesus.” But even those who are not Christians will recognize that a poisonous ideology has been smuggled into what ought to be a neutral text. If Americans must mark as a pioneer the first black woman to lead the fire department of a city of 99,000, then our present preoccupation with race and sex can never end. Dolasia’s article is devious because it implies as much without actually building a case. What is a child reader to conclude but that an obsession with immutable physical characteristics is both a moral and a social requirement?

The final assignment under review prepares students to learn about an inspirational SpaceX flight scheduled to launch this September. Regrettably, it also employs a semantic tricksiness that can be described only as Orwellian. Written by Emily Moulin, the DOGO News story “Hayley Arceneaux to Become the Youngest American to Go to Space” contains few surprises in its celebration of its 29-year-old heroine. Arceneaux, young readers discover, is a survivor of a rare bone cancer and a “literal” example of “shoot[ing] for the stars.” As the “first [American] with a prosthetic limb to travel to space,” she is “opening space [exploration] to people who are not physically perfect.”

All fine and good so far, despite the (now-familiar) reliance on exhausted identity tropes. The problem arises a few paragraphs later, when Moulin avers that Arceneaux “is set to be the first person with a so-called disability to go to space.” Note well this record scratch of a rhetorical gesture. Having constructed her entire article around the fact of Arceneaux’s physical limitations — having invited readers to laud her perseverance in overcoming them — Moulin now inverts her argument and declares that Arceneaux is not, in fact, disabled at all. Instead, she possesses a “so-called disability.” To describe her handicap as a handicap is suddenly, abracadabra, to reinforce a damaging social construct arising from invented categories.

That this is more than a failure of consistency on the author’s part should be immediately clear. Consciously or not, Moulin is undertaking an insidious project. In order to preserve its ur-narrative that every human being is either victim or victimizer, the Left must drag into the present tense the historical suffering of traditionally persecuted groups. Yet to do so requires acknowledging that such groups actually exist in some objective sense. Needless to say, conceding anything of the kind risks excluding not only the transgender community but the transracial and transabled men and women whose approaching footsteps can already be heard. The only solution is a kind of doublethink. To be disabled (or black, or a woman) is to face endless obstacles in this oppressive country. Also: Disabledness, blackness, and womanhood are artificial classifications encompassed by pencil-thin lines.

While it would be madness to assert that children will turn immediately into model citizens of Oceania upon first exposure to such maneuvering, Moulin’s ploy does serve a purpose. First, and not insignificantly, it reminds adult teachers that the Left’s rules apply even to elementary-age instruction. (There is no left-wing conspiracy. There is implicit belief-guidance in 90 percent of newspaper articles, stand-up comedy acts, and contemporary novels.) Second, and far more important, it prepares young students to accept contradictory ideas without discomfort if so ordered. Crucial to the conservative project are the notions that words matter, that truth and falsehood are irreconcilable, and that a thing is itself and not something else. Just as essential to progressivism is the undermining of these principles. In a culture that is splintering on precisely the question of who gets to define reality, little could be more imperative than their maintenance.

I should, having written this much, be clear that my daughter’s school is mostly excellent. Teachers believe sincerely in the mission, pupils are challenged, and our family is happy there. Yet this, I’m sorry to say, is exactly the point. No matter how reliable one’s K–12 is, unless every staff member is a conservative ideologue trained to sniff out leftist hokum, progressive distortions will slip through. Significantly, they will not be identified as such but will hang in the air like so much noxious smog. Private schools, in short, will not save us. Parental attention to the minutiae of learning just might.

The diligence I’m calling for is, I confess, no small thing, and working parents have other concerns. We are, however, nearing a cultural breaking point. We must rise to the moment. When next Johnny sits at the table to do his homework, read over his shoulder.