I didn’t need a curriculum to tell my four‑year‑old that people are different. He sees it before breakfast—at the shoe pile by the door: tiny red sneakers beside size‑12 boots. Different hair. Different voices. He notices, then looks up at me to learn what difference means. That second part—what we model in the space after noticing—is where a culture is made or unmade.
Lately, we’re teaching something else. We’re training children (and the adults who teach them) to scan the room for harm and punish first, ask later. We call it care. We call it safety. It often looks like neither. It’s control, dressed up in compassion.
The truth is simple: awareness is innate. Suspicion is learned. And suspicion is being taught.
The teacher reads a story about a farmer. A boy blurts out a clumsy question about the picture—he’s five, his mouth outruns his mind. Yesterday, this was a moment for coaching: “Try that again, kinder.” Today it becomes an incident. A form is opened. The boy learns that curiosity is dangerous and silence is safe.
Across the room, a girl raises her hand to question the premise of a lesson. Yesterday, that was called critical thinking. Today, it’s “denial,” and she’s routed to training. She learns that disagreement isn’t a muscle to strengthen but a risk to manage.
Multiply those moments by hundreds and you get a school where children rehearse compliance instead of citizenship.
A quick word on DEI (so we’re clear)
When I say DEI here, I don’t mean basic decency, equal protection under the law, or teaching kids not to be cruel. I’m talking about the dominant anti‑oppression, identity‑first strain of DEI that sorts children into categories, sacralizes the language of harm and safety, and imports corporate training reflexes into classrooms.
I’m not against inclusion. I’m against indoctrination—programs that prime suspicion, reward accusation, and mistake public ritual for repair. If your “DEI” builds skills—listening, mediation, due process, disagreement without exile—I’m with you. If it builds taxonomies and guilt quotas, I’m not.
In this article, DEI is shorthand for that identity‑centric, punitive frame now moving through schools and institutions. If that’s not your program, wonderful. But where this frame rules, the outcomes below tend to follow: more reports, more punishments, colder rooms—and children who learn to distrust their own eyes.
We used to teach kids how to live with difference—how to hold their shape and still be kind; how to argue an idea without exiling a person; how to say, “I might be wrong,” and mean it. Now, in the name of anti‑oppression, we’re giving them a lens that pre‑loads malice into ordinary friction. A clumsy question becomes an incident. An awkward moment becomes a microaggression. Disagreement becomes harm.
If you’ve followed my work, you know I’m not theorizing from a safe distance. I’ve watched institutions dissolve debate into dogma. I’ve watched “inclusion” become a loyalty test that excludes the one difference that matters most in a free society: diversity of thought. I’ve seen grown adults tiptoe around plain truth, terrified that the wrong adjective will trigger an investigation. That is not inclusion; it is ideological probation.
A new multi‑study report crossed my desk and put numbers to what many of us have felt. Participants read short, recognizable anti‑oppression excerpts—Kendi/DiAngelo on race, ISPU materials on Islamophobia, Equality Labs on caste—or a neutral control. Then they judged scenarios stripped of any evidence of bias. Again and again, exposure to the frames increased hostile attribution and inflated the appetite for punishment. People were more likely to see discrimination in neutral stories, to demand suspensions and trainings, to call for apologies. Even warmth toward the out‑group didn’t budge. Suspicion rose; affection didn’t. That is awareness curdling into animosity.
I don’t need a randomized trial to know what that does to a classroom. I can see it on a playground.
How language turns a classroom into a tribunal
Language is a steering wheel. When we sacralize certain words—harm, power, safety, microaggression—we tilt perception before facts arrive. Ambiguity gets resolved toward guilt. Social status accrues to the first person to discover injury. Policy follows perception: new reporting portals, mandatory trainings, public rituals of apology. The loop tightens and becomes self‑legitimating: the more harm we train people to find, the more policy we need to manage all the harm we’ve found. Soon you’re not protecting children—you’re protecting the system that protects itself.
That feedback loop explains why “awareness” programs so often conclude that we need…more awareness programs. It is a moral subscription model. And the cost is paid by children learning to mistrust one another and to mistrust their own eyes.
What development actually asks of us
Children already notice difference. The developmental task is not to teach difference; it is to teach composure, charity, and repair in the presence of difference. The work looks ordinary and unglamorous: turn‑taking, truthful apology, proportionate consequences, reintegration instead of exile. It is far easier to stage a public ritual than to shepherd two kids through a real reconciliation. But rituals teach spectatorship; reconciliation teaches relationship.
I want my son—and your kids—to master hard, unfashionable skills:
To argue cleanly and protect people ferociously while he does it.
To tolerate ambiguity, because most of life is ambiguous.
To refuse collective panic: “We don’t have evidence, so we don’t have a verdict.”
To say, “I might be wrong,” and still stand upright inside his values.
In our house, it sounds like simple sentences:
People aren’t the same. That’s good. If you’re curious, ask kindly. If you’re asked, answer kindly.
Awkward isn’t evil. Fix it. Try again.
We argue ideas and protect people. If you roll your eyes, you owe a redo.
Evidence first. Verdict later. Always.
In a school, it looks like adults who can host conflict without humiliation, policies that protect viewpoint diversity on purpose, and a bias toward repair over retribution. When someone blunders, the path is apology → amends → reintegration—not public spectacle.
The authoritarian tell
There’s a reason punishment surges when suspicion is taught. Authoritarianism—of any stripe—feeds on ambiguous wrongs and theatrical remedies. If the highest social good is the performance of care, then the fastest route to status is to find harm and demand penance. It’s a short road from “be aware” to “be afraid,” and an even shorter one to “be silent.”
The study I mentioned tracked this too: the stronger a person’s authoritarian bent, the stronger their hunger to police and punish once they’d been primed by anti‑oppression frames. It’s not that people became kinder; they became more certain that others were guilty. Certainty without evidence is not justice. It is zealotry.
“But aren’t you minimizing bias?”
No. I’m minimizing accusation without evidence. Real prejudice exists. Bullying exists. Malice exists. I want children protected from it and perpetrators held to account—clearly, proportionately, with due process. The problem is a set of frames that pre‑load suspicion and reward retribution, converting ordinary friction into a moral emergency. When everything is a microaggression, nothing is coachable. When every bruise is proof of a hidden system, no one learns to apologize like a human.
If your DEI program cannot increase warmth while it reduces prejudice, it’s not teaching inclusion. It’s teaching suspicion. Measure both. If warmth doesn’t move, you didn’t build a bridge; you built a watchtower.
The one difference we keep forgetting
We celebrate visible differences while punishing the hardest difference of all: the person who thinks differently. An institution can hang all the right posters and still run on ideological monoculture. That is not inclusion; it’s conformity with softer branding. I want my child to graduate fluent in disagreement—to be able to sit with people he believes are wrong without humiliating them or himself.
This is what a healthy pluralism asks of adults: host conflict without theatrics, resist the narcotic of outrage, and model the kind of strength that does not require an enemy to feel real.
A different prescription
Try this in your classroom, staff room, or living room for thirty days:
Replace “harm” with specifics. What happened? Who did what? What evidence do we have? What else could explain it?
Replace “policy escalation” with repair. Who needs to say sorry? What does restitution look like? How do we reintegrate the person with dignity?
Replace “training” with practice. Stage disagreements on purpose. Steelman the opposing view. Reward accuracy over applause.
Replace “safety” as silence with safety as the confidence that you can speak, be challenged, and remain in the room.
You will know it’s working when the temperature drops, laughter returns, and students start correcting themselves before the adults do.
The line I won’t cross
I’m not handing my child’s conscience to a committee. Not a school board, not a ministry, not a movement that confuses compliance for compassion. I will model tolerance—the grown‑up version that holds fierce differences without exile—and I’ll teach him to do the same. Because if our antidote to prejudice is teaching kids to hunt for it, we’ll raise sharp detectives and poor neighbours. I want something better: citizens. Neighbors. Men and women with a spine and a heart.
That begins where it always has: with adults who refuse the slide from awareness to animosity—and who show children what to do with the space after noticing. Notice, breathe, choose. We get to decide whether the next act is curiosity, correction, or condemnation. That decision writes the future.
Take heart,
Jason
Research referenced:
Had DEI arrived fully formed overnite into society it would've undoubtedly been rejected as absolutely bonkers. Now that it is being exposed for what it is and its origins sought out thankfully losing its losing its place of power.
That specific provenance lies, among others, notably in Rousseau, Marx, Critical Theory, and Postmodernism.
But it does make one wonder, what other batshit crazy ideology is fermenting slowly, steadily, inexorably under our very noses. It's always something.
This is critical social justice theory in a nutshell, along with its toxic tentacles critical race theory, gender ideology, queer theory, among others. As pointed out by another commenter, it's rooted in marxism and postmodernism. CSJT-based DEI, which much of it is, is an absolute train wreck.
The damage these divisive, destructive, unfalsifiable theories have done to higher education, public schools, nonprofit organizations, public schools, and government agencies is hard to grasp. Unfortunately it was adopted by the managerial class mostly without being carefully examined, because the idea of it sounded virtuous and this type of DEI was being pushed heavily by the government under democrat administrations.
To get a clear understanding of just how damaging it has been, I suggest reading the book Counterweight, by Helen Pluckrose. It's well worth your time. It's also important for those who are stuck in a work setting in which they are forced to participate in compelled speech and activities which violate their own values.
She is the author who, along with James Lindsay, wrote Cynical Theories, which explains how activist academia made everything about race, gender, and identity politics, and how harmful this has been for our country.