Knowledge is power, but innocence is bliss. While it’s sad to say, students no longer have the luxury to forgo power.
Executive Order 14253, also known as the Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History Bill, stands as a beacon of nationalistic subjectivity. It stands as a pillar of propagandistic censorship, erasing America’s legacy of generational racism, LGBTQ abuse, and DEI erasure, in the name of gentrifying the American ideology.
The executive order directs federal agencies to remove anti-American ideas from federal historical sites, such as a panel called The Dirty Business of Slavery detailing the nine people enslaved by George Washington located at the President’s House Site in Pennsylvania. Rather than teaching the thousands of visitors about how America has changed and improved from its troubled past, the order chooses indoctrination over fact.
America is changing day by day, focusing more on rewriting the standardized ideological mindset of the common citizen rather than actually combating the corruption rooted in our society.
Those in power — including lawyers, politicians, and even parents who actively push this new American policy — destroy history and education to edit the narrative, slowly and silently blinding future generations to their own failures. They target the youngest generation of Americans, nipping critical thinking right in the bud.
According to USC Libraries, in 2024-2025 alone, more than 10,000 books were targeted in American public schools, removed from shelves, and taken out of children’s hands. While the books are technically still available to children outside public schools, it’s highly unlikely that students have the time, energy, or understanding to find them.
By glossing over America’s history in classrooms, the majority of future American families — primarily families from marginalized groups — who are unable to attend private schools, are left with an overglorification of American history based on blind faith over facts.
With 65% of the 2021 K-12 students in the private student body system being white, according to data from the National Center of Education Statistics, this means that marginalized groups are left behind in public schools.
Every family, aside from the rich and privileged ones, faces a public education system where, according to the Kids Count Data Center, 70% of 4th graders can’t even read at a proficient level.
These policies are supposedly enacted in the name of protecting our children, but only serve to continue actively cutting students off from the history that represents their culture. Those in power choose to overstrain our education system, which directly undermines students who will become future adults, voters, and decision-makers, making them more susceptible to control.
Aside from books, those in power are now even pushing a whitewashed narrative through tinted glasses to control the media that children consume the most: online media.
The Prager University Foundation, also known as PragerU, produces high-production-value edutainment videos that often cover history and politics through a conservative Judeo-Christian lens. Furthermore, PragerU Kids, launched in 2021, creates videos for K-12 children focused on pro-American history, which have even been approved for use in many public classrooms.
Seemingly innocent enough at first glance, the real issues lie in the content it pushes. In one of the PragerU Kids videos, Columbus and the main characters talk about slavery. Columbus — a figure of authority in this episode — downplays the effects of slavery, saying it’s at least better than death.
Additionally, when one of the children tries to judge slavery through a modern lens, Columbus is once again framed as a more just, educated, and enlightened figure. He insults the children, shaming them for judging slavery through modern standards while downplaying and whitewashing the true extent of slavery.
For children who might be taught this narrative in schools, this type of subtextual imagery of shaming, questioning, and praising erasure eventually becomes the context that students will both live with and carry on to future generations.
The most dangerous issue of this subtextual indoctrination is the fact that people don’t even know it’s already working. According to a study from IPSOS, a leading world market research company, almost a third of Generation Z men believe that wives should obey their husbands.
According to a study by the Pew Research Center, America’s government sits as a conservative majority. Because of this, the majority has the power to continue to lead the push against open education. For the next generation of children, this means that staying still is no longer an option.
For students to stay still, to stay silent, and to stay uneducated is to give up their future freedom. They are soon approaching a future where free thought is shamed and critical thinking is attacked. At a certain point, unless they start preparing early, they won’t even be able to think for themselves, with viewpoints regressing farther back than ever before.
Not thinking for themselves is letting someone else think for them. By eradicating history, future generations risk not only echoing history but fully repeating it. The only way to prevent this is to start pushing students to learn more rather than blinding them from the truth.
Students don’t need to be protected from topics like war, death, civil rights, politics, and human rights abuse. Even if we tried our hardest to restrict and censor every single source of information available to children, they will always overcome and find a way; there will never be a way to protect them fully.
Education isn’t traumatization. It’s better to ensure a child is educated about a future they might face, rather than entering it blind. By baby-coddling children, they will not only never grow, but also never be ready. We should always strive for a world with prevention rather than mitigation.
In a time when a child’s human rights might be taken away, in a time when a child’s parents might be deported, they need to be ready.
By educating children, they can actually learn about the history of America, from the true extent of slavery to the history of human rights, before it gets erased. We no longer live in a society where baby-coddling stands as a feasible option. To choose innocence is to directly forgo knowledge and one’s very own power.
