The Curious Middle Guide to Ideologies in the Classroom

Those conversations focus on a specific pattern: the entry of political and ideological frameworks into K-12 classrooms, often presented as neutral or even obvious, and usually tilted in one direction. The frameworks our guests describe are overwhelmingly progressive and left-leaning. They are not presented as one perspective among many; they are presented as the correct way to read history, identity, and civic life.

This guide is not an argument that teachers are villains. Almost every guest we have had on this topic says the opposite: teachers are overwhelmed, under-supported, and often handed materials they did not choose. The issue is upstream — in curriculum design, teacher training, and the quiet erosion of civics.

1. The problem isn't one lesson. It's the framework.

Both Brandy Shufutinsky and Monica Harris make the same point from different angles: the controversy over school content is rarely about a single book or a single unit. It is about the interpretive framework a curriculum installs — the lens students are trained to apply to everything else.

Shufutinsky traces the intellectual roots of "liberated" ethnic studies to critical pedagogy, a framework that sorts groups into oppressor and oppressed categories and treats that sorting as the primary tool of analysis. Once that lens is in place, a history lesson, a literature unit, and a math word problem can all be delivered through it without any individual assignment looking radical on its own.

"The ideology holds that I'm suffering from internalized oppression because I'm not willingly categorizing myself as part of the oppressed class."

— Brandy Shufutinsky

"If you are, or simply appear to be white, you're automatically put in the oppressor category."

— Brandy Shufutinsky

Shufutinsky, now Director of the Education and National Security Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, notes the scale of this: at least 22 states mandate ethnic studies in K-12, 24 more have folded elements of it into existing courses, and California has made it a graduation requirement — with no national standards for what is actually taught.

2. Ethnic studies: two very different versions

Monica Harris's episode is the most practical starting point for parents because she draws a line that gets blurred in most district communications:

• Descriptive ethnic studies teaches the history and contributions of specific communities. Most parents across the political spectrum support this.
• Liberated or critical ethnic studies is explicitly activist. Its stated goal is not just understanding, but producing students who will organize around a particular political analysis — almost always a left-progressive one.

Districts frequently adopt the second while describing the first. The vocabulary in the actual documents is the tell: words like liberation, decolonize, settler colonialism, praxis, and counter-narrative signal the activist model. Words like contributions, history, and perspectives signal the descriptive one.

The concern our guests raise is not that ethnic studies exists. It is that a particular ideological version of ethnic studies is being adopted in many districts, often without meaningful scrutiny, and often under a name that makes it sound like a benign cultural history class.

"The entire liberated ethnic studies model flies in the face of reality on the ground. It pits students against each other at the exact moment in life when they most need to see each other as allies."

— Monica Harris, FAIR For All

"Kids don't need to see each other as oppressors and oppressed — they need tools for civil discourse."

— Monica Harris

Harris — a Harvard Law graduate, former Hollywood executive, and author of The Illusion of Division — argues that much of today's polarization is manufactured, and that identity-based teaching deepens it rather than healing it. Her alternative is a unifying curriculum built on shared civic inheritance.

"We have so much more in common than what separates us, but division is being manufactured."

— Monica Harris

If your school requires ethnic studies, ask them to consider FAIR For All. FAIR's curriculum presents complex historical realities through primary sources and structured analysis, allowing students to reach their own conclusions. Its non-prescriptive approach empowers educators to bring inclusive history into their classrooms while maintaining academic rigor and community trust.

3. Teachers are not the villains. Teacher training is.

Marissa Streit's central argument in both of her episodes is that the fight over school content is mostly won or lost before a single lesson is delivered — in schools of education, credentialing requirements, and professional development days.

A teacher can be handed a neutral textbook and then sent to a professional development session that teaches them how to "complicate" it, "disrupt" dominant narratives, or frame every subject through a social-justice lens. Streit's point is that when training treats progressive advocacy as part of the job description, individual teacher intentions stop being the deciding factor. Good teachers are not the problem; the training they are required to absorb often is.

She also argues that some training explicitly discourages disclosure to parents — framing transparency as a threat or a form of political interference. That is where trust breaks down fastest: not when a teacher chooses to teach something controversial, but when parents are told, implicitly or explicitly, that they are not entitled to know what is being taught.

Marissa Streit makes a related point: you cannot ask students to join activist communities, celebrate revolutionary thinking, or resist systems they have not yet been taught to understand. A curriculum that skips U.S. history, comparative government, and the basics of how the country works while encouraging students toward political action is putting the slogan before the foundation. As she asks, how can students live in — or protect — a country they do not understand?

"How can they live or protect a country they don't understand?"

— Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU

"Education got us into this mess. Education is going to get us out of this mess."

— Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU

Streit walks us through the books used to train teachers — titles like Lessons in Liberation and Cultivating Genius — and the term "adultism," which reframes parental authority itself as a form of oppression. She also describes a teachers' union resolution instructing staff not to tell parents when a student is transitioning, and calls intersectionality as taught to kids "victim bingo": a way of recruiting students into causes that have nothing to do with their own lives.

"America is being taken down through ideas, through the erosion of what it is to be an American."

— Marissa Streit

"The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen."

— Marissa Streit

4. The civics gap nobody is arguing about

Sharon McMahon comes at education from a completely different direction — she was a high school government teacher — and lands on a problem both sides of the culture war tend to skip: most American students receive roughly one semester of civics in twelve years of schooling.

Her argument is that this is the actual emergency. Students graduate without knowing how a bill becomes law, what a state legislature does, how courts function, or why federalism exists. Into that vacuum flows whatever social media tells them. A citizen who cannot describe how power is distributed cannot notice when it is being misused — from any direction.

McMahon's framing is useful because it reframes the debate. The question is not only "Is this curriculum biased?" It is also "Is anything durable being taught at all?" When students lack a basic civic education, they are easier to influence with any ideological framework, left or right.

"We have under-educated our citizens for existence in a very complex democracy."

— Sharon McMahon

She also points out why this is so hard to fix: education policy in the U.S. is set by 50 separate state boards and more than 14,000 local school boards, which is why civics keeps getting defunded and sidelined without anyone deciding to defund it. And she models the posture we try to keep on this show.

"I think that you can love something while also knowing the truth about it."

— Sharon McMahon

5. What a parent can actually do

Concrete steps, roughly in order of effort:

1. Request the curriculum in writing. Ask for the scope and sequence, adopted materials, and any supplemental vendor programs, by name. Most districts must provide these. Put it in email so you have a record.
2. Read the framework document, not the sample lesson. Districts publish curriculum frameworks. That is where the vocabulary lives.
3. Check the professional development calendar. Search your district's board agendas for outside training vendors and their contracts. This is where ideology often enters.
4. Attend one school board meeting. Adoption votes happen with almost no public attendance. Showing up before the vote is worth more than complaining after it.
5. Ask your child open questions. "What did you talk about today?" beats "Did they teach you anything political?" Kids report better when they are not being interrogated.
6. Backfill civics at home. If school gives one semester, supplement it. Governmental structure, primary documents, and how local government works are all teachable at the dinner table.

6. Where reasonable people disagree

We are called The Curious Middle for a reason, so it is worth naming the honest tensions:

• We advocate for teaching from primary sources, debate, and allowing students to learn how to think, not what to think. We do not think students should be encouraged to join activist communities or resist their governments until they learn history and can decide for themselves about complicated issues.

If your school or district requires ethnic studies, consider the FAIR For All Many Stories, One Nation curriculum. It is designed to help families and educators ask for curricula that present complex historical realities through primary sources and structured analysis — without prescribing a single conclusion.