Indoctrinating the Third Grade
By Ari Kaufman
FrontPageMagazine.com
December 29, 2005

The day before Thanksgiving, third-grade students at the Frank Allis Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin, were given a curious lesson in civic responsibility. They were told to write letters to their congressman and various media outlets calling for an end to the war in Iraq.

Parents were sent a letter justifying this political indoctrination as a social studies lesson. “The Frank Allis third grade will be writing letters to encourage an end to the war in Iraq,” the letter explained. “The letter writing will teach civic responsibility, a social studies standard, while providing an authentic opportunity to improve composition skills and handwriting. If the war has not ended by the 12th day [of the letter writing campaign] we will start the whole sequence over again, writing to students in middle school, high school, and college.”

Signed by the “third grade staff,” the letter in closing asked parents to fund ten postage stamps and 12 envelopes for the project. As a “courtesy,” the teacher gave parents the option to opt out of the assignment – as if that excused the school’s attempt to recruit impressionable third-graders into the service of “antiwar” movement and mold their views on the War on Terror.
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