Reading · The Liberty Sentinel

In the ongoing war for the hearts and minds of America’s children, the left has unveiled its newest and most brazen weapon yet: Parents are the “oppressors” and children must be “liberated” from the “oppression.”

Under the banner of “ethnic studies” and the new buzzword “adultism,” teacher training programs and classroom curricula across more than 22 states are systematically teaching that parental authority is a form of oppression—tyranny, fascism, even.

Loving mothers and fathers who set boundaries on clothing, relationships, sexual activity, or medical decisions involving their own children are literally being cast as oppressors. In typical Marxist style, the “oppressed” — the children — are being groomed to rebel.

This is not education, of course. It is psychological warfare designed to drive a wedge between children and the parents God gave them.

PragerU CEO Marissa Streit is one of the prominent voices sounding the alarm after examining the materials. “They have to break the bond between a child and the parent,” she explained. “They have to break the bond between a parent and the community.”

“By creating an entire chaotic environment, you create an environment of collective grievance where the individual feels helpless and hopeless,” she added. “Then a new form of government comes out and says, ‘Well, you can’t trust anybody else, so therefore put your trust in us.’ And that is always what socialists have done.”

In teacher trainings now being exposed, “adultism” is presented as a force of oppression. As Streit explained, when an adult behaves like an adult — telling a child not to dress provocatively, not to engage in sex at a young age, or not to pursue experimental gender interventions — the parent is supposedly committing adultism.

One passage from the training text states: “Adultism teaches us that adults have the power and the right to decide what young people’s boundaries should be.” The clear implication is that this power and right must be rejected.

Central to this push is the teacher training manual Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators, published by the radical AK Press. It promotes anti-capitalism, Critical Race Theory, and the explicit rejection of adult authority.

Ethnic studies modules, Streit notes, simply repackage the discredited doctrines of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI), Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), and Critical Race Theory (CRT) to advance the same Marxist ideals under a new label.

Workshops have already sparked controversy even in places like San Francisco. The far-left “education” establishment there is using materials claiming that systemic power dynamics make the relationship between students and educators inherently oppressive—and by extension, the parent-child relationship as well.

This is no isolated excess. It is the logical next step in a decades-long campaign to weaponize government schools against the family, the Christian faith, and the free society those institutions undergird.