By David Goodwin
With less than a week on the job, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has just been directed by President Donald Trump to pursue school choice, an issue that seems far outside the traditional purview of the Department of Defense (DOD).
Yet, the DOD is involved in more educational activities than expected. Through an activity called the DODEA, it teaches roughly 66,000 K-12 children of both active-duty and civilian members of the armed forces at a cost of $2.25 billion annually.
The DOD also manages the U.S. Military Academies of West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy.
More conventional defense secretaries with more conventional qualifications have long ignored the DOD’s sizeable education portfolio, happy to focus on issues that would cause only ripples in the glassy bureaucratic sea over at the Pentagon.
But as Secretary Hegseth’s co-author in our book Battle for the American Mind, I think Hegseth was chosen precisely because he has the skill and the transformative vision to turn the DOD’s comfortable complacency into a tempest of reform and efficiency.
In our book, Secretary Hegseth and I wrote about the threat of Marxist teachers and partisan ideologues who teach our children to reject patriotism and embrace far-left social justice activism.
This includes the DODEA and the U.S. Military Academies.
Over the past four years, the DODEA director was an avowed social justice warrior named Tom Brady, who said diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) should be “embedded in everything we do.”
Brady appointed a DEI leader who literally described herself as a “woke administrator.” When this scandal was uncovered, the DODEA shut down its DEI office only to resurrect the same ideology behind closed doors.
For example, the DODEA still peddles equity and antiracism in teacher training and retains an internal DEI steering committee.
The U.S. Military Academies are no better. At West Point, students have been instructed in critical race theory, including being fed propaganda about whiteness, structural racism, and “modern-day slavery in the USA.”
The Naval Academy adopted anti-white racial preferences in its admissions, eschewing meritocracy in favor of DEI. In the thrall of the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, the Naval Academy Superintendent mandated diversity training for all students, faculty and staff.
Meanwhile, the Air Force Academy, bowing to the transgender craze, trained cadets to stop using terms like “mom” and “dad.”
These scandals are much more consequential than normal culture war skirmishes.
Wokeness—with its attendant critical theory, diversity training, and perennial accusations of systemic racism—trains people to condemn America as irredeemably bigoted and hateful.
When our education system teaches students to hate America, that becomes a national security issue.
When those students are future military officers in the case of the academies or the close relatives of military members in the case of the DODEA—a group that comprises a majority of generational recruits in the armed services—this national security issue becomes a full-blown crisis.
If Hegseth’s past advocacy against wokeness and zeal for education reform is any prologue, big changes may come to the DOD-managed education systems.
These changes will start with giving our armed service members school choice. Not only would this restrain politicized DOD bureaucrats from meddling where they don’t belong, but it would also put education in the hands of parents, where it should be.
When you sign up to serve our nation, you shouldn’t have to turn your children over to Uncle Sam. Plus, surveys show that service members would be far more likely to remain in the service with more educational choices.
Secretary Hegseth can also use his authority to restore high academic standards and merit to the U.S. Military Academies. Racial admission preferences, as well as woke coursework and training, should be removed.
As Secretary Hegseth and I wrote in our book, schools, including the military academies, should adopt the Classic Learning Test in their application processes to measure readiness for college. This test returns to tried-and-true academic measures without the biases and declining standards of tests like the College Board’s SAT.
If I knew Secretary Hegseth, he would gladly implement President Trump’s order to bring school choice to the DOD.
But education reformers should buckle up: that will only be the beginning.
• David Goodwin is the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools and co-author of the book Battle for the American Mind with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
First published on Washington Times
Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation
President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has written a revolutionary road map to saving our children from leftist indoctrination.
Behind a smokescreen of “preparing students for the new industrial economy,” early progressives had political control in mind. America’s original schools didn’t just make kids memorize facts or learn skills; they taught them to think freely and arrive at wisdom. They assigned the classics, inspired love of God and country, and raised future citizens that changed the world forever.
Today, after 16,000 hours of K-12 indoctrination, our kids come out of government schools hating America. They roll their eyes at religion and disdain our history. We spend more money on education than ever, but kids can barely read and write—let alone reason with discernment. Western culture is on the ropes. Kids are bored and aimless, flailing for purpose in a system that says racial and gender identity is everything.
Battle for the American Mind is the untold story of the Progressive plan to neutralize the basis of our Republic – by removing the one ingredient that had sustained Western Civilization for thousands of years. Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin explain why, no matter what political skirmishes conservatives win, progressives are winning the war—and control the “supply lines” of future citizens. Reversing this reality will require parents to radically reorient their children’s education; even most homeschooling and Christian schooling are infused with progressive assumptions. We need to recover a lost philosophy of education – grounded in virtue and excellence – that can arm future generations to fight for freedom. It’s called classical Christian education. Never heard of it? You’re not alone.
Battle for the American Mind is more than a book; it’s a field guide for remaking school in the United States. We’ve ceded our kids’ minds to the left for far too long—this book gives patriotic parents the ammunition to join an insurgency that gives America a fighting chance.
Whether you’re a conservative looking to push back against the progressive agenda or simply someone who cares about the education of our children, this book is for you.
“Pete Hegseth brilliantly spotlights one of the most important issues facing our country: America’s children and their education. By exposing the undercurrents of wayward indoctrination in American education and reorienting the reader toward classical Christian education, he provides a solution to the feeling of hopelessness so many parents experience. Pete unrolls a road map to saving America’s children and providing our little ones a path to prosperity, success, and well-being.” — Kayleigh McEnany
“Forget what you thought you knew about education in America—this book will rock your consciousness. Battle for the American Mind exposes the insidious and hidden Marxist takeover of America’s classrooms, and arms every citizen, parent, and grandparent with a plan to fight back. For the sake of our Republic, read Pete Hegseth’s book.” — Mark Levin
“Pete Hegseth, along with David Goodwin, argues that a return to classical education alone cannot save American students from a century of ideological pollution and dumbing down of both K–12 and higher education. Instead, they envision “Christian paideia” reuniting Jerusalem with Athens and Rome, thereby restoring rational, empirical training that enhances faith and spirituality. Battle for the American Mind is cogent, occasionally polemical, and always engaging. Let us hope its passionate case for restoring morality and sanity helps to spark an American educational renaissance.” — Victor Davis Hanson
“It is time to rethink the importance of education and bring it back under the Lordship of Christ. Much of the compromise we see in the church can be traced to how we educate our children. This work pulls back the veil to reveal the sinister agenda of progressive education and prescribes a little-known antidote that will, with the grace of our Lord, have a real impact on the future of our kids.” — John MacArthur
“Pete Hegseth is a patriot, and as such he is unwilling to abandon the educational system to the predations of the militant Left. In Battle for the American Mind, Hegseth lays out the state of play: how far gone our educational system is and what we can do to take it back.” — Ben Shapiro
“If you want your civilization to continue, few things matter more than what your children learn in school. Our kids are learning to hate the society our ancestors built. Pete Hegseth has seen it, and in this book, he’s got a solution.” — Tucker Carlson
“Pete is a phenomenal patriot and this book is a must-read. The education fight is the most critical in America.”— Charlie Kirk
“Liberals have been using the education system as an indoctrination assembly line for decades. This book is an eye-opener and a must-read for any parent concerned about their children’s future.” — Dan Bongino
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