On January 29, 2025, a presidential executive action titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” laid out a lengthy strategy to combat “indoctrination” of public school students; however, this same document says the purpose of public education is to teach “patriotic admiration for this ‘incredible’ nation.” The second sentence of the document denouncing indoctrination states clearly that public schools are meant to provide nationalistic indoctrination!
The document continues, sometimes using dog whistles and sometimes using overtly prejudicial language, to denounce and threaten educational efforts to teach the realities or actual histories of marginalized or minority communities. Basically, anything that would make cisgender heterosexual white people, males in particular, feel anything but pride for any and every event in white-dominated American history, is forbidden on penalty of losing federal funding.
The order doesn’t really OPPOSE indoctrination; it IMPOSES white nationalistic indoctrination. This obviously can prove problematic for queer kids, kids with Queer parents, students of color, female students, immigrant families and more. Facts aren’t radical; forbidding them from being shared is.
