In the latest episode of Breaking Battlegrounds, the show welcomed Daniel Buck, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, director of the Conservative Education Reform Network, and a leading voice on K-12 education reform. Buck pulls no punches in describing what he sees as one of the most powerful—and dangerous—forces in the so-called "swamp": the American education system.

While education may not match defense or entitlement programs in terms of federal spending, Buck argues that its influence is unmatched, as it quite literally shapes the minds and values of future generations. What concerns him most is not just poor academic performance, but the ideological agenda being driven from within the very institutions tasked with training future educators.

Buck reveals findings from his ongoing research, including open records requests to major universities for their teacher training curricula. What he’s found is troubling: rather than preparing teachers in foundational academic subjects like reading, math, or literature, many teacher training programs are offering courses such as “Queering Education” at Harvard and “Exploring Gender and Sexuality in Everyday Curriculum Practices” at Columbia’s Teachers College.

He warns that education has become a vehicle for ideological transformation rather than intellectual development, describing it as a tight feedback loop between teachers’ unions, national education bodies, and universities, all propped up by taxpayer dollars.

According to Buck, what once was a system built to educate is now being weaponized to influence. From a conservative lens, he sees this as a form of political social engineering, likening it to the tactics used by empires and authoritarian regimes to reshape youth into ideological foot soldiers.

The episode offers a sharp critique of the current educational landscape and raises pressing questions about the role of politics, indoctrination, and the true purpose of public education in America.

Transcript

**Sam Stone: **Our next guest up today, Daniel Buck, is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, director of the Conservative Education Reform Network and an affiliate of AEI's James Q. Wilson program in K-12 education studies. So this man spends every day digging into maybe the deepest part of the swamp. Education is a disaster across this country.

**Chuck Warren: **Daniel, would you say this is one of the biggest things of the swamp, the education juggernaut?

Daniel Buck: The education juggernaut?

**Chuck Warren: **Yeah.

Daniel Buck: I mean, it pales spending-wise in comparison to, you know, the military or entitlements. As far as influence, I mean, it is setting up the next generation, everything that they think about the world, what they know, what they don't know. So it's part of influence. I mean, I definitely think you can make the case that it's the most influential part of the swamp.

**Sam Stone: **And in that vein, obviously, it's really the entire mechanism is dependent on government funding, right? You have the teachers unions, which feed into all the national organizations, which feed back to the universities.

It's this very tight feedback loop. And taxpayers have been paying for not, they're not trying to teach teachers to make kids better at math and ABCs. It's things like, as you discuss in your piece, Harvard offers a course to prospective teachers on queering education.

Daniel Buck: Yeah, I've been doing a lot of digging into coursework right now for prospective teachers. I've actually got a lot of open records requests at universities for their syllabi to try and figure out what exactly are they teaching teachers, but I mean at Harvard there's a course called Queering Education.

I was looking at one today at Columbia Teachers College on exploring gender and sexuality in everyday curriculum practices. What you would expect teachers are learning at teachers colleges and teacher prep programs and schools of education how to teach kids their letters, how to teach them basic math, good questions to ask about great literature.

That's not what they're getting at all. They are getting, I mean, just a conspiracy theorist could not come up with some of the wild, coarse titles and content that teachers are encountering in these schools of education.

**Sam Stone: **They have really taken to heart the idea that if you get kids early enough, you can turn them into whatever you want.

I mean, there's kind of the famous thing about you know, the Brits would say about the Romans take our kids and we get back Romans. The Soviets understood this. They're really trying to create the momentum for their political goals by replacing education with ideological indoctrination. At least it seems that way from the outside.

Listen to the full episode of Breaking Battlegrounds anywhere you stream your podcasts!