According to a report from the Claremont Institute, classes from the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) teach children radical activism, gender ideology, and hiding gender questions from families.
The lesson plans aren’t about teachers helping children learn the basics; instead, they’re about teachers helping children hide facts from their parents.
“Maybe that student is not ‘out’ to other students in their gender identity,” seventh-grade humanities teacher Genevieve Chavez said in a video provided to Claremont by a whistleblower. “They may be out at school; but they may not be out at home.”
The video was part of a 2021 summit talk titled “Ally 101—Creating an Inclusive Classroom for LGBTQ+ Students.”
In the same talk, Chavez urged teachers to speak about new gender identities with young children.
“You can talk about LGBTQ+ things in elementary school,” she says. “It’s actually the ideal time. Kids as young as 4 years old are already starting to develop a stable understanding of their gender identity. Elementary school is the perfect time because you can really show students the diversity of gender expression and gender activity.
Claremont notes in its report that many parents disagree with exposing children to gender confusion at an early age.
“Parents have long taken for granted that cultivating a stable sexual identity is a key to individual development. Our military schools think upsetting a stable identity is the key to education,” the report states.
The 2021 summit urged teachers to filter every aspect of school life through radical gender ideology, the report states.
Prom kings and prom queens should be homecoming court or royalty or partners of distinction, teachers should say their own pronouns to normalize it, and teachers can keep the preferred pronouns of students secret from parents, according to Lindsey Bagnaschi, who was teaching high school drama at Stuttgart High School in Germany, which serves local army bases.
It’s also a mistake to call a roomful of students ‘guys’ instead of ‘seventh-graders’,Chavez says.
This year, students rejected the idea of scrapping the old titles, the Claremont report states. But there’s always next year.
The DoDEA’s program also encourages students to activism, according to the Claremont report. The DoDEA’s Strategic Initiatives seek to provide equitable learning experiences for all students.”
To do so, the government suggests implementing “programs and supports to address achievement gaps between racial, ethnic, ability, and other identified groups” and provide “learning environments where students feel safe, secure, and supported by the entire learning community.”
The DoDEA also promises to “stand up and grow Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) structures to lead and implement DEI across the organization so that all students, employees, and families feel welcomed, respected, engaged, and empowered.”
The Claremont Institute notes that none of the DoDEA’s focus areas emphasize math, engineering, or any other form of academic excellence, and never define terms like “Key Performance Indicators.”
According to the report, encouraging students to restructure schools to hide the gender binary will teach them to restructure society as adults.
“If students are used to restructuring their school environment, they will become activists for restructuring the general culture once they leave school,” the report states. “Future citizens, sons and daughters of military personnel, will become much more like their teachers than like their parents.”
A DoDEA presentation on equity and access tells teachers to instruct students in having conversations about critical race theory, the Claremont report states.
Such a conversation is one that “explores the relationship between identity and power, that traces the structures that privilege some at the expense of others, that helps students think through the actions they can take to create a more just, more equitable, world,” according to the presentation.
Tracy Shelton, a literacy coach at Feltwell Elementary, which teaches the children of Americans serving at Air Force bases in Great Britain, recommended that children study books to learn how to be antiracist, the report states.
Racism and antiracism allow no neutral party, Shelton says.
“Racists, Shelton said, following the work of Ibram Kendi, are those who do not fight for racial equity, while antiracists put the fight for racial justice at the center of their lives,” the report states.
Even white people being silent are damaging, according to presentations quoted by the report.
“I was reading ‘Me and White Supremacy’,” says one teacher, and what it teaches “about white silence, and I realized the damage I was doing by my white silence,” the report states.
If teachers can’t get radical books onto reading lists, they can get them to children through independent reading time, book clubs, and literature circles, says Merilee Debus.
Debus is a professional practice improvement specialist at the DoDEA, according to her LinkedIn page.
“We still have a lot of room for getting the right book in their hands when they need it.”
Another teacher, Betty Roberts of Robinson Barracks Elementary School, which serves five military bases in Germany, recommends reading books without critical race theory using critical race theory interpretations, the report states.
She urged students to “take a look at their textbooks and [to] identify … the biases and how underrepresented groups are represented in these textbooks.”
The Claremont Institute ended its report with a call for action from public officials and Congress. But if they don’t act, military parents have one last nuclear option, the report concludes.
“It seems that members of the military who object to such education are no longer welcomed in the military. Perhaps they should just walk out of the military schools with their children or walk away from the military altogether,” the report states.
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