Why Schools Propagandize and What You Can Do
Have you ever been confused about WHY schools stopped focusing on basic education and turned to activism training? We’ve been watching the plummeting test scores and seen the social, emotional and physical damage to our kids. How many sad stories we hear about students confused about basic identity, emotionally depressed and angry at the world and their parents. But WHY did this happen?
Mary Ann Dellinger, PhD, MAEd can explain how we got here, and what we can DO about it. And for further context, we recommend James Lindsay’s book, The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire's Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education.
Marxism, Critical Pedagogy, and the Making of the Educator
Pedagogy, in its broadest sense, refers to the art, science, or profession of teaching—the process by which knowledge is transmitted from one generation to the next. Marxist pedagogy, however, redefines the role of the teacher and the classroom. In this framework, education is not a neutral transfer of knowledge, but a political act oriented toward social transformation.
The figure most associated with this view is the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. In his landmark Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Freire rejected the idea of the teacher as the transmitter of knowledge. Instead, he advanced the role of the educator, whose responsibility is to facilitate dialogue and raise critical awareness. As Freire himself wrote, “Education either domesticates or liberates. It can never be neutral.”
This distinction between “teacher” and “educator” became central to what is now called
Critical Pedagogy. This philosophy views all education as political, requiring educators to reflect on “for whom and on whose behalf” they are working. Within this perspective, the classroom is not simply a space for learning traditional subject matter, but a place for developing social consciousness.
Core Principles of Marxist Pedagogy
A central tenet of Marxist pedagogy holds that subjectivity and lived experience, rather than objective knowledge, form the basis of learning. Rather than starting with subject content, the educator begins with the student’s personal and social reality. Through dialogue and reflection, students analyze that reality in terms of power, inequality, and oppression. The aim is to cultivate conscientização—critical consciousness—which then emboldens students to act collectively for social change.
The method is often described as a three-step process:
Experience: beginning with the learner’s lived reality.
Critique: analyzing that reality through the lens of power and oppression.
Collaboration: creating a new understanding collectively, with the goal of transformation.
This cycle—experience, critique, collaboration—can also be understood as construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction.
Classroom Applications
In practice, the construction-deconstruction-reconstruction process typically reshapes even traditional subjects. For example, the Arizona English Language Arts Standards for Grade 3 require instruction on nouns and pronouns. A teacher using conventional methods could rely on an explicit grammar lesson. A teacher working within a critical pedagogy framework might instead begin with a children’s book such as Payden’s Pronoun Party.
In the construction phase, students could share stories about their own parties—what was celebrated and who attended—while the teacher highlights their use of pronouns, especially he and she. During the deconstruction phase, the class reads the book and discusses the use of pronouns, with the teacher deliberately steering the conversation toward gender identity. Finally, in the reconstruction phase, students survey one another about their pronouns, then write personal narratives identifying themselves as ze or they.
Thus, a standard grammar lesson becomes the vehicle for discussions of identity and social issues.
Historical Origins
The influence of Marxist pedagogy on U.S. education cannot be understood apart from the Latin American literacy campaigns of the mid-20th century. I would argue that few pedagogical philosophies, except John Dewey’s, have had a greater impact on American public education today.
Communist leaders across the region, most prominently in Brazil, Nicaragua, and Cuba, launched literacy efforts that relied heavily on Freirean methods. Trained brigades of educators (brigadas de educadores) spread through rural and urban communities, teaching reading and writing with curricula that were highly structured and ideologically uniform. The only variation from one country to the next was the insertion of local political figures such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba or Augusto César Sandino and Carlos Fonseca in Nicaragua.
The success of these campaigns demonstrated the power of education as a tool for shaping social and political consciousness. In Cuba, literacy rates reportedly jumped from around 77 percent to 96 percent in just one year, while Nicaragua’s 1980 crusade cut illiteracy nearly in half. But in both cases, the texts were saturated with revolutionary propaganda: people learned to read, but they were not taught to think critically about what they read.
Influence in Teacher Education
Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains a cornerstone of teacher education in the United States. Its influence is especially visible in courses such as Foundations of Education, traditionally the first class in teacher preparation programs. An open-source textbook published by SUNY Oneonta in 2021 summarizes the guiding principle in this way:
“Therefore, issues involving social, environmental, or economic justice cannot be separated from the curriculum. Critical pedagogy’s goal is to emancipate marginalized or oppressed groups by developing, according to Paulo Freire, conscientização (critical consciousness) in students.”
Meanwhile, math and reading scores have steadily declined nationwide. This is no coincidence: for decades, what begins in teacher education has filtered into the classroom, where knowledge is steadily sacrificed to militancy. The more we allow it, the bleaker our children’s, and our country’s, future.
Conclusion
Marxist pedagogy is not merely a teaching method, but a philosophy of education rooted in political and social transformation. Emerging from Marxist theory, developed by Paulo Freire, and refined in Latin American literacy campaigns, it redefined the teacher as “educator,” the classroom as a site of activism, and the lesson as a vehicle for raising critical consciousness. Today, what began in those literacy campaigns now shapes the foundations of American teacher education, embedding Critical Pedagogy from the very first courses future teachers take.
Meanwhile, nationwide scores have fallen to historic lows—a stark reminder of the consequences when activism displaces content.
But while we work to remove the Marxist pedagogy from our schools, here is what you can do now to have a direct impact on your child’s education:
Demand accountability in curricula and policy
Volunteer in the schools
Review curricula selected for adoption
Require that Teacher’s Manuals, not only student textbooks, be available for public review before adoption
Speak at school board meetings
If we leave teacher education, professional development, and teachers’ unions to the Marxist-Maoist model, the destruction will only become more invasive, more dangerous, and more prolific.
And as long as activism displaces content, our academic scores will continue to plummet.
Mary Ann Dellinger, PhD, MAEd, is Professor emerita of the Virginia Military Institute.