“It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.” —children’s author T.H. White

It is time to call the majority of progressives who control America’s education system exactly what they are: Monsters.

Only monsters would rob young children of the innocence and wonder that is the essence of childhood, in a despicable effort to replace those qualities with a partisan political agenda. Only monsters would teach a child what to think, not how to think, and make them feel horrible if they don’t buy into it. And though the rank indoctrination of children has been occurring for more than half a century (if not longer), most parents and other adult Americans assumed that no matter what the children learned in school, they would ultimately “grow out of it” once they hit the “real world.”

That assumption is anachronistic. The real world has been wholly subsumed by cyberspace and all the pathologies that attend an ongoing and expanding obsession with social media. And the phones-turned-computers that make that obsession — and an equally burgeoning surveillance state — possible have all but eradicated anything resembling personal autonomy.

In short, conform or be canceled.

America’s educators are more than happy to nurture what amounts to a herd mentality, and because they are monsters more than willing to destroy a child’s innocence in service to their agenda, the entirety of American “education” can be reduced to a single concept that infects all subject matter, from math and science to art and culture, along with everything in between:

Nihilism.

How does one get a child to fully embrace radical environmentalism? Tell a seven-year-old the planet has less than a dozen years to survive unless they’re willing to march in lockstep with that agenda, no matter what sacrifices are required.

And what would “education” be today without those same monsters feeding children a steady diet of Critical Race Theory (CRT), whereby a child is told his entire frame of reference and his innate goodness or badness are determined solely by the color of his skin? Only monsters would tell young children that they are inherently “privileged” or inherently “victims.”

The monsters in the Biden administration and the Democrat Party are more than willing to help enshrine this abhorrent dynamic. In April, the Department of Education (DOE) posted its “Proposed Priorities” for American history and civic education, and a bill, “Educating for American Democracy” (EAD), is pending in Congress. Together, and using federal funding as a hammer, they are aimed at ensuring every child in America is taught that they live in a systemically racist nation. And in case one might take issue with that assessment, know that the DOE is including the historically flawed and propagandist 1619 Project and the resources of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History to the mix, as a means of showing the way “history and civics education can lead us out of our dim, denialist past.”

Denialist past? America was one of the first nations on earth to end the universal practice of slavery — at a cost of 360,000 union soldiers’ lives. We passed three constitutional amendments banning slavery, guaranteeing due process and equal protection to former slaves, and securing the right of black Americans to vote. We continue to embrace minority business set-asides by government, affirmative action, and a dubious disparate impact theory whereby any nondiscriminatory practice that nonetheless produces a disproportionate negative effect on a protected group can be challenged as racist.

Yet for the monsters, Martin Luther King’s hope that the content of one’s character would transcend the color of one’s skin is effectively dead.

The transgender agenda? Is there anything more monstrous than teaching a young child that biological and chromosomal reality should be wholly subservient to a political agenda that asserts everything related to being a boy or a girl is “fluid” — and that anyone who dares to question that assertion is a “bigot”? Only monsters would knowingly and willingly confuse and/or terrify the vast majority of children to serve a tiny percentage of them. Only monsters would countenance — or is that champion? — irrevocably altering the biology of a seven-year-old boy with chemical castration or the removal of healthy breasts from adolescent girls in service to that agenda.

And once again, the monsters in the Biden administration are willing accomplices. Via executive order, boys self-identifying as girls will be given access to women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams. Schools that don’t comply will lose federal funding.

Critically, Americans must understand that at least two generations of children have grown up in a world where privacy is virtually nonexistent. It’s a world where Big Tech monsters, under the auspices of “enhancing” the educational experience, have been compiling digital profiles of young children at a level that would make George Orwell blush. And they are doing so often without parental permission — or knowledge.

Moreover, under the auspices of increasing educational opportunities, the Biden administration intends to provide the nation with universal pre-K for three- and four-year-olds. Eighteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put that effort in perspective, asserting, “There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.”

The pandemic? Perhaps nothing says “monster” more forcefully than the de facto extortion engendered by unionized educators who either outright refuse to return to in-school learning unless they receive odious political concessions, or are allowed to create a rigid conformity among children who remain required to wear masks at all times, even to the absurd point where a teen runner collapsed near the finish line of an 800-meter race because she couldn’t breathe properly.

How twisted are some of these unionized monsters? In Seattle, a school board decided a homeless encampment adjacent to an elementary school — replete with weapons and open drug use — should not be removed because it would be “inhumane” to do so, even as kids were only allowed to enter and exit the school from one side of the building. In Loudon County, Virginia, parents who opposed the teaching of CRT were targeted for retaliation by a group of teachers and parents whose stated purpose in part was to “infiltrate,” use “hackers” to silence parents’ communications, and “expose these people publicly.” The Loudoun County Public School (LCPS) district also distributed a graphic dividing Americans into “privileged” and “oppressed” groups.

For far too long, decent Americans have been reticent to call out those who would turn innocent children into progressive automatons. And concerned parents are made to believe they are horrible people if they refuse to embrace Marxist-based collectivism, in all its soul-crushing glory.

That time is over. Ideological zealots who would willingly drown the innocence and magic of childhood in a sea of nihilism, self-doubt, and self-loathing — and call it education, no less — are not to be abided, tolerated, or left unchallenged, any more than one would allow America’s children to be kidnapped, beaten, or sexually abused.

These people are monsters. And it’s time we said so — in no uncertain terms.