by Larry Sand
The pervasive homegrown progressive forces, which emphasize politics, sex, and race—all from a radical perspective—have become entrenched in our education system in recent years. But growing evidence shows that foreign enemy influence has also become a factor in the indoctrination of our students.
A report by DefendingEd, released in August, reveals that for decades the Chinese government and its affiliates have been engaged in a global campaign called the ‘Belt and Road Initiative,’ designed to advance Red China’s political and cultural agenda. This ongoing effort includes programs intended to influence how young people in the U.S. view China, targeting K-12 and university students.
To underscore the seriousness of this diabolical plan, in November 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping invited 50,000 U.S. students to study in China over the next five years through the Young Envoys Scholarship (YES) program.
The Diplomat discloses that these U.S.-China exchanges serve a political function for China and have been “sponsored, carefully narrated visits attached to institutions and trumpeted in official state media accounts, often in ways that serve Chinese cultural diplomacy interests.”
The DefendingEd report indicates that at least 83 universities and 26 K-12 schools in 30 states exposed their students to Chinese Communist Party propaganda through the YES program.
In reality, China is likely home to the world’s most tyrannical government, guided by a totalitarian ideology and ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. It deprives citizens of their rights on a sweeping scale and systematically curtails freedoms to retain power. As the U.S. State Department explains, “People in China cannot practice the religion or belief of their choice. They cannot express their opinions openly or form or join groups of their choosing without fear of harassment, arrest, or retribution. Members of minority groups are subject to mass arbitrary detention, Orwellian-style surveillance, political indoctrination, torture, forced abortions and sterilization, and state-sponsored forced labor.” Notably, the Chinese government systematically detains and persecutes both Uyghur Muslims and Falun Gong practitioners.
But the ominous assault on our students is not limited to China. Since 1996, Emzari Gelashvilli, a former Georgian intelligence official who reviewed KGB operational archives, has documented the systematic use of active Soviet measures to infiltrate Western educational institutions.
His findings show that the ideological transformation of American and other Western universities is not the product of organic domestic political evolution alone. At a minimum, it reflects external actors’ successful exploitation of institutional vulnerabilities—chiefly the Soviet Union’s intelligence apparatus, whose documented objectives align with the outcomes now visible on many U.S. campuses.
One example of the Communist indoctrination process is the demoralization stage, which lasts 15 to 20 years, precisely the time needed to educate one generation. Gelashvilli explains, “Operational documents specified that education was to be stripped of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and foreign languages. In their place: social grievance curricula, permissiveness, ideological conditioning. The intended output was explicitly named: ignorance.”
Islam has also been part of the invasion of our schools by external forces.
Elaine Ellinger’s The Hidden Curriculum of Islamic Schools: From Prayer to Sharia—A Child’s Indoctrination, a nearly 300-page study, examines an English-language Islamic Studies curriculum for grades 1 through 12 and the materials children encounter: textbooks, exercises, religious stories, prescribed behavior, Quranic passages, accounts of Mohammed and his allies, etc.
Another example of school-based Islamic intrusion occurred in 2017, when the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) wormed its way into the Philadelphia school system under the guise of “student safety and inclusion.”
CAIR then took action and orchestrated a series of lesson plans, training sessions, and workshops for students and educators advocating the elimination of terms such as “jihadists,” “Islamic terrorists,” or even “radical Islamic terrorists” when teaching about the 9/11 atrocity in 2001.
The Philadelphia School District bought into CAIR’s propaganda big time. As described by Thom Nickels, a Philadelphia-based journalist, “Educators and students were reminded that these acts of mass murder had absolutely nothing to do with Islam. Instead, the emphasis was placed on the rare post-9/11 attacks on individual Muslims in American cities and on the growth of so-called Islamophobia (aka, intelligent discernment) in society at large.”
It’s worth noting that it’s not only public schools that are being affected by pro-Islam disinformation. In Dallas, second-graders at the private Brighter Horizons Academy are taught that non-Muslims are “the worst of all creatures,” according to a recent Middle East Forum report. The curriculum review also exposes the extremist views of the school’s principal and staff and textbooks that emphasize holy war and praise the work of terrorist-linked charities.
The efforts to indoctrinate students are not just a problem in our country. In alarming news from Canada, Calgary parents received notices that their children were restricted to “No Food” zones at school because they were banned from the eating areas during the Islamic month of Ramadan. “Woke Canadian school bans children from eating in its cafeteria and lunchroom to avoid offending Muslim students during Ramadan,” wrote Anna Wright in the Daily Mail in March.
Not surprisingly, as Communist and Islamist indoctrination has become omnipresent in our schools, Jews have not fared as well, especially at the college level. According to a recent poll, 83% of Jewish college students nationwide have experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023, and 27% of respondents reported that the hatred came from faculty members.
The University of California, Davis has a well-documented anti-Jewish problem. In April 2025, the StandWithUs Center For Legal Justice filed a formal complaint with the Department of Education, alleging “a pervasively hostile, antisemitic campus climate, with incidents of unlawful discrimination and harassment, for students.”
When all is said and done, homeschooling is the best way to prevent children from being indoctrinated. Parents need to take charge of their children’s education, just as they feed, clothe, and house them. Outside groups have infiltrated many of our nation’s schools, often making propaganda, rather than traditional education, their foremost priority.
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Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network—a nonpartisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.
