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Radicals: The Minds We Shape Become the Society We Inherit

Radicals: The Minds We Shape Become the Society We Inherit

Last updated on: October 21, 2026 at 4:44 pm by Dennis Knapp

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Radicals: The Minds We Shape Become the Society We Inherit 2026-10-21T16:44:22-06:00 Dennis Knapp

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France is burning…

What supposedly began as student protests over poor school conditions has escalated into millions in property damage (including damage to the 143-year-old Limoges City Hall in southwestern France), looting, hundreds injured, and thousands arrested. All this mayhem over overcrowded classrooms and inadequate facilities? Doubtful.

According to Katharine Birbalsingh, headteacher of Michaela Community School in London, the deeper problem may lie not in the condition of our schools but in what we teach within them. In a recent interview on the podcast Triggernometry, she observed:

Too many of our young people have been taught in their schools, in their homes, in the media, everywhere that Britain is a racist, bad country… But the fact is just teaching our children all the time the narrative of oppressor versus oppressed and that if you have any kind of victim identity, you might be gay or trans or you’re suffering from mental health or you have special needs or you’re black or you’re brown or you’re Muslim or you’re Hindu or whatever it is. All of these various different identities make you into a victim and therefore the state, the British state is the bad. They’re the baddies and Britain is bad.

As a headteacher, Birbalsingh is no mere outside observer. She stands on the front lines of modern education, and her observations deserve serious consideration. What she describes ought to send a shiver down our spines. By repeatedly presenting history primarily through the lens of oppressors versus the oppressed, are schools across the West cultivating the very radicalism that later manifests in adulthood?

What happens when we spend a child’s formative years teaching him that history is a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed, then send him into adulthood expecting him to see his fellow citizens as neighbors rather than adversaries?

From Historical Interpretation to Moral Identity

The historical lens of oppressor versus oppressed finds much of its intellectual foundation in the thought of Karl Marx. He understood history primarily as a continual class struggle between those who own the means of production (the bourgeoisie) and those who must sell their labor (the proletariat). Thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and their colleagues in the Frankfurt School subsequently expanded Marxist analysis through Critical Theory, while Antonio Gramsci developed related ideas concerning culture and power. These approaches moved beyond economics to examine how culture, ideology, and institutions shape and sustain relationships of domination. Later critical approaches extended these questions to race, gender, colonialism, identity, and other dimensions of social power.

Does history contain oppressors and the oppressed? Of course, and we must teach our children these historical realities. However, when we move from studying actual instances of oppression to interpreting nearly every historical development through that relationship, we cross a line.

Children who repeatedly encounter this framework may gradually internalize a moral outlook that associates virtue with victimhood and guilt with membership in a perceived oppressor class. Individual moral responsibility gives way to collective moral categories. Rather than learning to evaluate historical figures according to their actions, motivations, and circumstances, students may begin assigning moral standing according to which side of the historical struggle those figures occupy.

We stop teaching children about historical injustice and begin teaching them whom to resent.

And so, the seeds of radicalism take root.

The American Experiment: The 1619 Project

In August 2019, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones launched the 1619 Project to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first recorded enslaved Africans in English Virginia. The project sought to reframe American history by placing slavery and its enduring consequences at the center of the national narrative. Rather than treating 1776 as the defining starting point of the American experiment, the project proposed 1619 as an alternative foundational date through which to understand the nation’s economic development, culture, political institutions, and social inequalities.

The subject matter itself presents no objection. We must examine slavery’s role in American history, the suffering it inflicted, and the consequences that extended beyond emancipation. However, we must also consider the implications of making oppression the central interpretive framework for understanding the American founding and subsequent national development. When this framework enters the classroom, do we risk shaping young Americans to regard their nation’s institutions—and even their fellow citizens—with suspicion?

If a child comes to understand America’s history primarily as the story of one group exercising power over another, why should we expect him to interpret contemporary American society any differently?

And if the nation itself becomes associated with oppression, does opposition to that nation begin to look like a moral obligation?

From Grievance to Radicalization

Consider a hypothetical student named Tami. She enters kindergarten in Buffalo, New York, where she encounters a historical education heavily influenced by the 1619 Project. Through its partnership with the Pulitzer Center, the project has entered American classrooms, offering educational resources even for elementary school students. Some materials target children as young as second grade. Consider the significance of introducing a particular interpretation of American history to children like Tami, who have barely begun developing the intellectual tools necessary to critically examine it.

As Tami progresses through school, imagine that the oppressor/oppressed framework becomes her default way of interpreting history. Gradually, she begins applying those same categories to contemporary institutions and social groups. Disagreements become less about competing ideas and more about justice versus injustice, liberation versus oppression. Political and social conflicts take on increasingly absolute moral dimensions.

Over time, Tami begins to question the legitimacy of the institutions around her. Rather than viewing them as imperfect human arrangements capable of reform, she increasingly regards them as mechanisms designed to perpetuate domination. Radical solutions consequently become more attractive. If the existing social order is fundamentally oppressive, why reform it when dismantling it appears to offer the more just alternative?

And eventually, Tami confronts a more troubling question: If dismantling oppressive structures becomes her highest moral obligation, what limits remain on the methods she might employ to accomplish it?

When the Children Become the Adults

Returning to Birbalsingh’s observation, her concern extends beyond radicalization to the erosion of social cohesion and shared national identity. What happens when citizens no longer regard one another as members of a common society but as political and historical adversaries? Teaching young people to view others through such categories risks undermining the very bonds that hold a nation together. After all, children eventually become voters, activists, journalists, political leaders, and parents. The intellectual assumptions they develop during their formative years influence how they approach the social and political disputes of adulthood.

For those who champion democratic pluralism, consider how difficult it becomes to sustain when citizens increasingly interpret disagreement through moralized group conflict. Cancel culture offers one illustration of how an adversarial worldview can discourage dialogue, compromise, and shared civic responsibility. When we regard those who disagree with us not merely as mistaken but as participants in oppression, what incentive remains to engage them in good faith?

Can we teach children to divide history into oppressors and oppressed and then express surprise when they divide their neighbors into those same categories?

Final Thoughts: Education or Indoctrination?

We must return to the distinction established at the beginning of this article: teaching children to recognize injustice is not the same as teaching them to interpret the world exclusively through it. A proper historical education ought to expose students to the complexity of human motivation—virtue, vice, ambition, compassion, greed, sacrifice, faith, and self-interest. Reducing people to categories of oppressor and oppressed risks obscuring their individual moral responsibility and accountability. History education should cultivate independent moral judgment rather than supply children with predetermined enemies. As adults entrusted with forming the next generation, we must recognize our responsibility to develop young minds intellectually and morally, not radicalize them.

Children do not remain children. The historical narratives we place before them today may become the assumptions through which they interpret the world tomorrow.

If we teach them that society is principally a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, we should at least consider what happens when they take that lesson seriously.

After all, if the world is divided between those who oppress and those who are oppressed, and justice demands liberation from the former, have we simply taught our children history—or have we already taught them that they have a revolution to finish?

Thank you!

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