Our Schools Teach Our Kids to Love Socialism. Let's Teach them Liberty.

The Cicero Institute, the Reagan Foundation, and the State of Texas are fighting communist encroachment.

The purpose of public education in America was never just to teach basic literacy or vocational skills — it was to shape citizens capable of sustaining a free republic. Our Founders understood that liberty cannot survive in an ignorant populace. Thomas Jefferson, the most forceful advocate for public education among them, argued that knowledge was the first line of defense against tyranny. “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people,” he wrote, “They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

Jefferson envisioned schools as the foundation of a civic culture — places where students would learn the principles of natural rights, the responsibilities of citizenship, and the lessons of history needed to resist despotism. He believed liberty was not a birthright to be taken for granted, but a fragile inheritance that required each generation to be taught anew. “The qualifications for self-government in society are not innate,” he warned. “They are the result of habit and long training.” That was the original mission of American education.

Today, that mission has been betrayed. In a cruel twist of fate, American public education now often does the opposite. Instead of teaching students to resist despotism and preserve liberty, much of our education system has been captured by ideologues who program young people against our country's history and principles—a total disaster. It is the duty of every free citizen who cares about our country to stand against this perversion of our educational system.

Every day, there are American students who enter classrooms where they learn to hate capitalism and admire socialism — the deadliest ideology in human history. According to recent polls, 60% of young Democrats view socialism favorably, while support for capitalism among those under 30 has plummeted to just 40%.

The success of these divisive ideas represents a profound failure in American education. At a time when communist China threatens our security and neo-Marxist ideas infiltrate our institutions; we are raising a generation dangerously ignorant of communism's brutal legacy and increasingly receptive to the very ideas that led to over 100 million deaths in the 20th century.

While Soviet-style gulags aren’t appearing on American soil anytime soon, the destructive ideas that built them are already evolving within our own liberal democracy. After communism’s economic collapse, Marxist theorists didn’t disappear — they simply changed strategies. Instead of class warfare between workers and owners, today’s neo-Marxists divide society along cultural and identity lines: race, gender, sexuality.

They’ve successfully infiltrated key institutions — universities, corporations, and government agencies — where they now push radical theories that paint America as inherently oppressive. The tactics are more subtle than those of the old Soviet Union. But the ideology remains just as hostile to individual liberty and the merit-based values that built American prosperity.

To understand today’s radical left-wing movements, students must first grasp the brutal legacy from which these ideologies evolved. Influential Marxist educators like Paulo Freire helped recast education as a form of political activism. Instead of teaching students to think critically, they’re taught to view themselves as revolutionaries in a struggle against systemic oppression.

This influence can be seen clearly in the rise of Critical Race Theory within school curricula. In 2021, the head of Detroit’s public schools admitted: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you’ll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines. We were very intentional about embedding it.”

Students are never taught the brutal reality of communism. They graduate knowing little to nothing about Mao’s China, where over a million landlords were slaughtered, many antifa activists’ wet dream. But it didn't end well for anybody. Where forced collectivization and industrial quotas triggered the deadliest famine in history—so extreme that desperate families resorted to cannibalism. Up to 55 million people perished, a death toll larger than the combined populations of Florida and Texas. How many teachers even mention this?

How many students ever hear about the Khmer Rouge slaughtering infants by bashing them against trees to save bullets? Or how Stalin’s communists seized Ukrainian farmers’ food, leaving millions to die gnawing on tree bark and grass? Do they learn about North Korea’s modern gulags, where prisoners lose limbs to frostbite after grueling 16-hour shifts on starvation rations? Do they see the US and UK leftists in the 1970s marching and cheering in support of Mugabe, then study the violence, mass starvation and annihilation of the economy that followed? No. Instead of exposing atrocities, schools sanitize communism, repackaging it in euphemisms like “equity” and “social justice.”

But history shows what those words meant in practice: during China’s Cultural Revolution, for instance, “equity” meant dividing up food from seized farms equally, which destroyed incentives and ultimately led to a famine that killed tens of millions. To Mao's Red Guards, “social justice” meant making family members torture each other in "struggle sessions." If students were taught that this is socialism, rather than free healthcare and housing in Scandinavia, would they still sympathize with Marxist ideas?

Today, leftists divide society into "oppressors" and "oppressed." They silence dissent through public shaming. They force ideological compliance through struggle sessions. They demand confessions of privilege. Many lives were destroyed — whether through job loss or social ostracism — by this new form of militancy.

Just as Holocaust education often focuses too narrowly on death camps and statistics while missing the ideological forces that enabled genocide, we can't just teach students about gulags and famines. We must also teach them the evolution of communist ideas to the present day. That way young students will grow to be armed with knowledge and critical judgment to resist passively accepting what their future sociology professor tells them.

Let’s be clear about what we’re facing: This ideological capture of our institutions was deliberate. After communism failed economically, Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse called for a “long march through the institutions” — the systematic takeover of schools, media, and bureaucracies to transform American culture. We now see the results: Universities openly promote “critical” theories that are repackaged Marxism; and anthropologists, historians or (God forbid) educators or sociology professors who love American values - or even just openly believe in the power of free markets to lift up civilization - struggle to find work in academia. Elementary schools echo the propaganda, and teach children to view themselves primarily through the lens of race and the oppressor narratives.

Recently, there's been a significant backlash, with major corporations and some universities backing away from DEI and similar programs. But these ideas won't disappear overnight — they've been incubating in our education system for decades. As long as schools continue teaching students to view the world through a neo-Marxist lens of group conflict and systemic oppression, this ideology will continue threatening the individual liberty and merit-based principles that made America prosperous. Sadly, our grandchildren will still be fighting communism and its related ideologies in some form. But we'd like them to be fighting it from a position of strength.

That’s why we're proud to help create and fund a new high school program by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute to teach students communism's brutal history, and its evolution into today's divisive ideologies. Through a comprehensive program combining historical analysis, survivor testimonies, and modern-day applications, they're teaching students both the brutal realities of communism and how its ideas have morphed into seemingly benign modern movements.

The program helps students understand how communist ideology justifies atrocities by sacrificing individual rights for collective control, and how these same dangerous principles resurface in contemporary movements.

Reagan warned that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Today's youth are that generation.

Nothing in our Constitution requires taxpayers to fund communist indoctrination in our schools. Given that many schools and teachers are unlikely to teach this material voluntarily — and some even sympathize with these destructive ideologies — legislation is essential.

The Cicero Institute, which I founded, wrote a new law — Texas Senate Bill 24 — that just passed and is on its way to the Governor’s desk. It requires Texas schools to teach students the truth about communism: the mass killings, the famines, the propaganda, and how those same ideas are showing up today under new, attractive branding. Students will learn how communist regimes crushed freedom — and how those tactics are still being used to silence dissent and push collectivist ideologies in America. And they won't just learn the 20^th-century history: the bill requires content about current-day threats to the United States and its allies posed by communist regimes and ideologies, the ideological evolution of communism from economic and class-based theories into broader cultural movements that divide our society, and modern methods used to spread communist ideologies.

The Founders knew that each generation must be taught anew to love liberty and understand the principles that preserve it. Our Constitution's checks are important in the battle against tyranny. But with activist judges and radical ideologues winning elections, our free country is under threat. We must fight back and reclaim our educational approach to once again teach love of our country and its principles, and the necessary frameworks to defend liberty. It is the duty of every free citizen who cares about our country to resist this corruption of our educational system.

What have you done to fight the commies this month?

The battle for liberty begins at home and in the classroom. If we fail to teach the next generation the truth about communism and the value of freedom, we shouldn't be surprised when they grow up to reject both. As Jefferson warned, no nation can remain simultaneously ignorant and free. The choice is each of ours.

First image: Velvet Revolution, Prague 1989. Second image: Team USA defeats Team USSR, 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Third image: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech by President Reagan in West Berlin.