How Schools Are Weaponizing ‘Inclusion’ and ’Social Emotional Learning’ to Indoctrinate Children
“My great grandfather ran from communism. The people that dragged him out of his little bakery shop and beat him weren’t soldiers. They were college kids—the Red Guard. And I see that that’s what they’re creating now with a lot of these kids.”
After watching the destructive impact that progressive policies were having in California, Alvin Lui packed up and relocated to the Midwest. But in Indiana, he saw the same ideology taking hold.
“So I realized that if I didn’t try to at least do something … that I can’t complain. And I have nothing to complain about because I grew up in the time where I might be able to do something about it, even if it’s just a couple of parents at a time,” says Lui.
Today, Lui is president of Courage Is A Habit, which creates resources for parents to help protect their children from ideological indoctrination masquerading as education, from pronoun ideology to “social emotional learning.”
“When you weaponize parents’ kindness against them to guilt them—to emotionally blackmail them so that they give up control of their kids—there’s no way that you’re the good guy,” says Lui.
We discuss how transgenderism is being pushed in schools by teachers, administrators, counselors, and social workers, who aim to drive a wedge between parents and their children. We also look into how social media corrupts young minds and predisposes them to depression and a negative body image.
“Social media really messes with girls’ minds, right? Men? We get it too, but not as badly as girls. This is why the transgender cult affects girls more than boys,” explains Lui.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/alvin-lui-how-schools-are-weaponizing-inclusion-empathy-and-social-emotional-learning-to-indoctrinate-children_5007771.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Alvin Lui, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Alvin Lui:
Thank you, it’s such an honor to be here. I’m really excited about our conversation.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, I am too. I’ve been coming across these very, well-designed materials that seem to be floating around the internet, explaining in very simple terms things related to gender ideology, what parents should know in relatively simple language that anybody could understand. I found myself wondering where’s all this coming from? I kept seeing the “Courage is a Habit” moniker popping up, and then I discovered Alvin Lui.
Mr. Lui:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’ve been very active in trying to educate parents, especially, but also kids, around the realities of what’s being taught in schools these days. And you’re a parent yourself, obviously. Just give me a sense of how this all began. When did you realize that something was amiss?
Mr. Lui:
I’m originally from California. I was born and raised in California, and I moved my young family from California to Indiana in April of 2020. Now, that was right in the beginning of the pandemic. We didn’t move because of the pandemic. It was already planned, and we moved to Indiana. The Midwest is wonderful. We couldn’t be happier.
But then, I started seeing the same seeds starting to grow that ruined California. To be frank, I was just tired of fighting. In California, you’re just fighting all the time. At the time, you didn’t realize that a couple of generations of kids had already been indoctrinated in academia in K-12. Because California is always ahead on what the rest of the country is seeing now. When I saw this in Indiana, what was interesting is that everybody reacted the way we did 20 years ago. “Oh, it’s not that bad. Oh, it’ll fix itself.” In Indiana, and especially in the Midwest, they’ll go, “It will never happen here.”
Mr. Jekielek:
We’re talking casually about 20 years of indoctrination, but what exactly was being taught back then, and what were people being indoctrinated with?
Mr. Lui:
Instead of teaching children rigorous academics in school so that they could be independent, successful people, they were teaching them a certain brand of politics. It wasn’t, “Here is the Left, here is the Right,” and then let them make the decision. It was, “Here is the woke ideology. Here is one side, and the other side is bad.” When you do that, children will naturally grow up, of course, to vote one way. And that’s what happened in California.
Everybody laughs at California about how they got that way. They got that way because they were indoctrinating the children to vote only one way, and to vote that way even if it’s to their own demise. When I saw the same thing in Indiana, I saw the same seeds being planted, it was like watching the same movie again, except I knew the ending. At that moment, when I realized this, I realized there was really nowhere to run.
My great grandfather ran from Communist China when he was already an older man. That’s how my father got here, and my siblings and I were born here as well. Moving from California to Indiana is nowhere nearly as dramatic, obviously. We’re very lucky to still live in this country. But I realized that there’s nowhere for my children or anybody’s children to run. There’s nowhere to go.
As I always allude to, nobody’s escaping the United States to go to Cuba in the middle of the night. I realized that if I didn’t try to at least do something, even in the tiniest form, that I can’t complain. I have nothing to complain about, because I have grown up in a time when I might be able to do something about it, even if it’s just a couple of parents at a time.
Mr. Jekielek:
20 years ago, there wasn’t as close a tie between voting for the Democratic Party and say, woke ideology.
Mr. Lui:
Right.
Mr. Jekielek:
And by no means is it a one-to-one thing, even today. It’s definitely much more prevalent.
Mr. Lui:
Sure.
Mr. Jekielek:
Was it the voting that you noticed, or was it the ideology that you noticed, or both? Are they always tied together? What do you mean by that?
Mr. Lui:
It was a lot of young people having opinions and thoughts that, when questioned, they would fall back on a lot of rhetoric and a lot of slogans. One of the things in California is the whole issue of illegal immigration. They have convinced generations of people that letting floods and floods of illegal aliens into the state has no impact on your finances or your safety or anything, no matter what facts, and no matter what kind of statistics you show them. That doesn’t matter.
They just go, “No human is illegal.” Growing up there, it’s like fish that don’t know they’re wet, right? When you’re growing up there, you have no idea because you grew up there. Then, when you start having kids, and you’re just trying to build a business, you start to go, “Why is it like this here in California? And then, you start traveling. The thing about people in California is they don’t travel very much. That’s the funny thing. They just stay around California.
When you start traveling to other parts of the country, you start to ask, “Why is this state using their tax dollars so well? They don’t have any of the GDP of California, yet their roads are better. Their infrastructure is better. This is better. That’s better. Schools are better. Their safety is better. Why is that?” That’s what started me kind of working backwards.
Mr. Jekielek:
Okay, I understand. Then, you decided, I’m going to get out. I’m going to go to Indiana.” You realized now that there’s nowhere else to go. So, you got busy doing something, and it was like, “Okay, I must make educational materials that everyone can understand.” How did that happen?
Mr. Lui:
I had a small nonprofit in Indiana, focused on a very local level. I live in a very nice city called Carmel, Indiana. Even there, the school board and the schools already have these ideologies in there, the transgender ideology and the critical race theory. They have porn in schools. The superintendents straight up lie and say, “No, I don’t think we do,” and we present it to them at the school board and read it out loud, the same thing. This is in a really nice, affluent place. But then, I also realized that it’s something that is going to blanket the whole, entire country. It is not a red state, blue state thing, and to be fair, it’s not even the Democrat-Republican thing. It really isn’t.
Mr. Jekielek:
Right.
Mr. Lui:
It’s really just an attack on children’s innocence. It’s a complete attack on separating children from families. We can talk a little about how they’re doing that, and some of my tools are about explaining that, but that’s really what it is. My great grandfather ran from Communism. The people that dragged him out of his little bakery shop and beat him weren’t soldiers. They were college kids, the Red Guard. I see that’s what they’re creating now with these kids is this revolutionist thinking; to hate America, to hate American values, and to drive a wedge between the family. You have to drive a wedge between the parents and children first before you can get them to be revolutionists. Throughout history, that’s always been the playbook. That has to be the first step.
Mr. Jekielek:
How is that wedge being driven?
Mr. Lui:
In K-12 today, the way they’re driving that wedge is using both race and gender. It’s coming through a mental health program called Social Emotional Learning, and it sounds really great. They use terms that all parents love, like empathy, personal responsibility, and responsible decision making. All those things sound great, but they’re doing what we call language contamination.
So, for example, empathy. You and I and probably everybody watching, all the just normal people watching, we generally know what empathy is. In the schools today, when they bring in social emotional learning, what they mean is, today, when a little girl is in a dressing room or a locker room, if a boy walks in and is changing next to them, now, they have to have empathy. This is not using empathy. They’re weaponizing kindness, and they’re weaponizing empathy. They’re not using it in the way that we think of it.
Now, about school counselors. We did a big expose on school counselors and social workers. They are redefining two words, safe and abuse. We always believed that if a child is unsafe, it’s because they’re being neglected at home, beaten, or starved, that kind of thing. Today, they’re not safe if you don’t succumb to the transgender ideology—if you don’t use their pronouns, if you don’t let them have breast binders, if you don’t let them take puberty blockers.
Then, the schools say, “The parents are unsafe. They’re causing the suicides. They’re neglectful and abusive, but we’re the safe space.” And what’s interesting is that if you redefine a term, you don’t have to change the laws. You just expand on that existing law to be able to separate the kids from their families, which is why we see a lot of these stories now becoming more and more prevalent across the country.
In Maine, there was a social worker that gave a breast binder to a 13-year-old. You have one in Wisconsin where they’re transitioning a minor against the wishes of their parents, and there’s a lawsuit there. On and on, you’re seeing that, and it’s happening mostly due to the counselors and the social workers. It’s coming through the mental health program, Social Emotional Learning.
We can go into more detail, but in a nutshell, that’s how they’re using it to separate the kids from their family, by sexualizing kids early. When the parents disagree, because what parents wouldn’t disagree with this, they use that to say they’re unsafe and they’re abusive.
Mr. Jekielek:
Of course, there are parents who are abusive.
Mr. Lui:
Right.
Mr. Jekielek:
And there are parents who create unsafe situations at home.
Mr. Lui:
That’s right.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s just that the concept of that has now been redefined to include people who are trying to create a loving home.
Mr. Lui:
Right.
Mr. Jekielek:
But because it doesn’t fit with the gender ideology specifically, now they are the abusers.
Mr. Lui:
That’s right. You know, it would be like, let’s say there are parents that say, “I don’t ever feed my child fast food. Everything has to be freshly made.” Okay, great, but imagine if those parents went to school and they wrote the policy, and they said, “If you feed your child McDonalds, you’re abusive.”
The problem is, with Social Emotional Learning and all these really arrogant teachers and school board members and counselors and social workers, they believe they know better. They know better. They want to push their idea of what good parenting is onto everybody else, but that’s not what a government entity is supposed to do. This is a public school.
If they are truly abusive, we already have programs existing that protect those kids. Is it a perfect system? No, of course not. We see a lot of these terrible stories where the system does miss it, but the answer isn’t to do a blanket-wide program in the schools and say, “All parents are abusive and continue to expand on that.” That’s how you separate children from their parents.
Mr. Jekielek:
We hear about Social Emotional Learning as multifaceted tool to bring people into this way of thinking, but it’s just a survey. What’s wrong with a survey?
Mr. Lui:
The survey is how they continually do a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can talk about the data mining. The data mining is actually very, very, important, and that’s something that every parent can do. Every parent should be getting their kids out of this data mining survey. Before I talk about the survey, let’s talk about why Social Emotional Learning is so deceptive. I spoke earlier about empathy. You use empathy, but that really is about trying to get girls to suppress their natural rejection of having a male in the locker room and changing next to them. But let’s take another example of Social Emotional Learning—responsible decision making.
Mr. Jekielek:
Who would disagree with that?
Mr. Lui:
Who would disagree with that, right? What parent does not want their children to have responsible decision making? We teach them that from a very young age. Pick up your toys, right? It’s responsible decision making through the lens of a critical race theorist. It means that if you’re white, when you become voting age, you need to vote for things like reparations. That’s your responsible decision. You need to give up certain things because of white privilege.
And if you’re not white, you need to be taking down the systems that are oppressing you, and everybody else. It doesn’t matter how successful you are in life, you’re being oppressed. That’s your responsible decision making. That’s you being responsible. Let me give you an example, and this is an analogy that I use for parents who are just getting into this, because a lot of this can be very nebulous.
Mr. Jekielek:
By design.
Mr. Lui:
By design.
Mr. Jekielek:
Yes.
Mr. Lui:
Yes, when parents go to school and say, “You’re pushing political indoctrination. You’re pushing critical race theory,” and you’ve already heard this many times, Jan. “We’re not teaching it. We’re not teaching critical race theory.” Okay, I’m going to say it, they are correct. They are not teaching critical race theory.
But California actually has a critical race theory program before you graduate high school, but most other states don’t. If you teach critical race theory, it means that you have a class, like 5th year critical race theory. Parents can opt their kids out. Kids don’t have to take it. That’s fine.
They’re not teaching kids what critical race theory is. They are teaching students on how to think and behave and live like a critical race theorist. Let me give you this example. Let’s say you and I decided to start a private school. You and I sit down and say, “Our goal is to create world-class mathematicians. These students coming out of our private school are going to win the most Nobel prizes ever for mathematicians.
Mr. Jekielek:
Mathematicians, yes.
Mr. Lui:
Yes. You and I sit down and that’s our plan, but of course, we can’t sell it like that because most parents don’t want to pay that much money for a private school, unless it’s a well-rounded private school. So, we advertise it as a very high-end private school. We have sports, we teach history, we teach science. We do all those different things.
But our school is structured in a way where as soon as the students walk in, the hallways have math formulas and pictures of historical mathematicians. During personal development, our teachers read books about how mathematicians have changed the world, and how important math is.
You and I are sitting at these beautiful seats. Well, they are engineered through math. That is how they are engineered, how they’re holding our weight. Everything that we’re looking at here is based on math angles. Teachers wear t-shirts with formulas. When we have assemblies, we bring in mathematicians from NASA, from Big Tech, from finance.
Then, after a couple of years, parents come to you and I, and say, “Jan, Alvin, I really like your school, but your school seems really heavily focused on math.” We’re like, “No, no, no, all we do is just teach basic algebra, pre-cal, calculus, and geometry.
If you and I created a school like that, what are the chances of kids graduating high school, as a K-12 private school, where all of them are extraordinarily good at math, better than the average person, even if they don’t have an aptitude for it? And the ones who have aptitude for it, they are going to go off and win Nobel prizes.
Now, take everything I said and replace the word math and mathematician with critical race theory and critical race theorist. They’re teaching children to live it and to be it, to think like one and to behave like one, and to structure their whole life purpose to push that mission.
Mr. Jekielek:
Tell me about school counselors. You were saying how they’re the biggest purveyors of this. That feels like there’s a lot of purveyors. Why are school counselors so significant here?
Mr. Lui:
There’s a lot of attention given to teachers and school board members, superintendents, and rightfully so. However, the teachers largely affect the culture of a classroom. School board members can spend the money on data mining. I’ll get back to the data mining. They can sign the contracts for the teachers, but they don’t generally impact a culture of a particular school.
They will impact the school district, but that particular school board member is not affecting that middle school, but the school counselors do. The school counselors and the social workers, they’re the ones in the break room. They’re the ones in the back, wagging their fingers at everyone when they’re not using the right pronoun and not using the right slogan, whatever the slogan happens to be.
The American School Counselor Association, I’ll refer to them as ASCA. They are the largest organization that trains all school counselors and social workers in K-12. They have a chapter in all 50 states. They’re the ones that drive the mission and the training and the objectives for school counselors and social workers.
They had an annual conference in Austin last July. The conference was called No Limits, which by the way, we found that very obtuse. When you’re around kids all day and you call your conference No Limits, we thought that was kind of on the nose. But we made sure that we went, and we grabbed their videos, their training, their speeches, their power points, their slides, and their handouts, because we knew that parents did not know that counselors are complete ideologues today.
They still think that they’re the nice guidance counselors we had when we all were growing up that helped you with your academics. Maybe you didn’t feel so good, and they talked to you a little bit, but if they thought there was a real problem, they’d bring your parents in to try and work with the parents. That’s long gone and no more, but it’s hard to prove that.
We decided that we are going to use their own words in their own habitat to expose who they are. We found so much. Some of it was online. Some of it was in that conference. Since then, we found a lot of different things, all the webinars