Many parents remember when classrooms were hijacked by partisan agendas under the labels of “social justice” or “critical race theory” — and how grassroots outrage drove those ideologues into retreat.
But under cover of a more innocuous, if less ambiguous, name, a new ideological infiltration is underway in American schools: “media literacy” and “digital literacy.”
Because if America’s classrooms become safe zones only for approved viewpoints, critical thinking becomes impossible.
This isn’t about teaching kids how to spot a clickbait headline or set safe passwords. It’s about shaping their perception of truth in a way that subtly aligns with regime-approved narratives — but not the narratives of anyone who questions power.
Here’s how it works. Schools roll out mandatory media literacy — or digital literacy — modules that promise to teach students to safely browse the web, avoid manipulation, and evaluate digital information. But the real lever is control: who decides what counts as trustworthy? Who gets branded as unreliable?
Leading the pack of “media literacy” curricula providers in K12 schools are the usual suspects. The Southern Poverty Law Center — a group now notorious for classifying mainstream conservative voices as “hate” — and NewsGuard — known for putting conservative media on advertising blacklists. (RELATED: Teachers Unions Utilize ‘NewsGuard’ to Censor Education)
In California, the state education department actually tells kids to reject content based on its source — regardless of whether the arguments hold water. In Rhode Island, whistleblowers reported a new media literacy provider that was “hyper‑focused” on Donald Trump. The result? Students are trained to reflexively distrust anyone beyond the approved gatekeepers. (RELATED: Conservative News Is Being Buried by Search Engines)
That’s not the kind of education American kids deserve. They should be taught to discern valid from invalid data and information and to ask the basic questions — who, what, when, where, why — encouraging genuine critical reasoning. You learn to dismantle bad arguments, not dismiss inconvenient ones. You challenge, engage, and outthink, rather than avoid.
Yet the media literacy push is gaining steam: over a dozen states, including the two biggest, Texas and California, have already adopted it statewide. What started as a conversation about “digital resilience” is fast becoming a campaign to make young minds skeptical of everything except the officially sanctioned narratives. (RELATED: The Southern Poverty Law Center Is the Real Hate Machine)
So what’s the fix?
- Teach core principles, not program-approved lists: Return to teaching kids to interrogate ideas — regardless of who delivers them.
- Scrap the suppression: Media literacy shouldn’t come with censorship tools or built-in blacklists.
- Rein in ideological gatekeepers: Obviously partisan outfits such as the SPLC or NewsGuard should not be permitted to dominate curricula.
Because if America’s classrooms become safe zones only for approved viewpoints, critical thinking becomes impossible. Indoctrination becomes mandatory. This dangerous development demands our attention before another whole generation of Americans loses the capacity to think for themselves.
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Allum Bokhari is a managing director at the nonprofit Foundation for Freedom Online, which investigates the causes and consequences of online censorship.