A newly published paper in a peer-reviewed academic journal demands that all US educators teach their students to hate Jews as their primary goal.
I am not exaggerating.
Who are these powerful people? The paper is explicit:
"Universities and institutions of higher education are often beholden to local, state, and national politicians, political interests, and funders with certain political interests. Often funders with a great deal of power and influence encourage university administrators to engage in compulsory Zionism by making statements condemning antisemitism whilst ignoring campus-based violence driven by Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism..."
Read that again. Jewish donors — "funders with certain political interests" — are secretly controlling university administrators, forcing them to protect Jews from criticism under the guise of fighting antisemitism. This is an antisemitic conspiracy theory published in a peer-reviewed academic paper being disseminated to teacher educators across the United States.
This is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with a faculty appointment.
And this is not incidental to the paper. It is the paper's engine. Because once you establish that Jews — excuse me, "powerful Zionist funders" — are the hidden power pulling institutional strings, then you have justified teaching children that Jewish power, Jewish funders, and Jewish influence is the enemy of justice. Starting in preschool.
That is not teaching children to love Palestine. The paper's subtitle makes it clear that the focus is not to support Palestinians but to center anti-Zionism in teacher education as the ultimate example of evil driven by power. That is teaching children to fear and hate Jews. The distinction matters, and the paper erases it deliberately.
Before dissecting the apparatus, we should let Padía state her own purpose. Buried in the paper's recommendations for teacher educators is a sentence that renders everything else unnecessary:
"The point of this turn is not to share 'balanced' views, but to unearth and help teacher candidates understand how power and oppression operate in interconnected ways, support them in their understanding of anti-Zionism in the context of anti-racist, anti-oppressive teaching and learning, and how to teach about systems of power and interconnected struggles for justice to (young) children."
There it is. The explicit, stated, unapologetic goal is not truth, not balance, not critical thinking, not even education in any recognizable sense. It is to instill a specific ideological framework — anti-Zionism embedded in a power/oppression worldview — in young children through the teachers trained under this program. Any semblance of balance or competing perspectives is dismissed as part of the problem.
Her goal is to brainwash young children.
Everything that follows in this analysis flows from that single sentence.
Padía presents what she calls "Pedagogical Integrity" — illustrated with this Venn diagram:
On one side: "Curiosity." On the other: "Conviction." The curiosity side contains two vague open questions: "What are the systems at play?" and "Who are my students and what are their identities?" The conviction side contains four fully pre-loaded political conclusions stated as facts: that Palestine deserves to be free, that Zionism is built on violent dispossession, that Jewish identity requires opposing Zionism, and that Palestine must be centered in teacher education.
The overlap — the alleged intersection of curiosity and conviction, the place where "pedagogical integrity" supposedly lives — contains exactly one thing: "Anti-Zionist turns in teacher education."
This is not a pedagogy. It is a funnel. Curiosity is the on-ramp. Conviction is the destination. The only permitted question is not whether Zionism is evil but how best to teach children that it is.
Padía argues explicitly that authentic Jewish identity requires anti-Zionism — that her own Jewishness is most fully expressed when she is, in her words, "dismantling the Zionist entity." She presents this position, held by a small minority of Jews worldwide, as the authentic Jewish moral voice. The Jewish student in her class who expressed discomfort with pro-Palestinian protest chants was not engaged with the curiosity her framework claims to prize. He was corrected. His concern was treated as something to overcome, a misconception to be resolved through proper instruction.
Jewish children in classrooms run by teachers trained under this framework will be taught that their families are wrong about their own identity. That their connection to Israel — religious, historical, cultural, familial — is not heritage but complicity. That the Judaism they were raised in is a tool of colonial oppression. That the real Jews, the morally legitimate Jews, are the ones who oppose Jewish self-determination.
This is not liberation pedagogy. It is the substitution of one coercive identity narrative for another, performed by someone who claims to be dismantling coercive identity narratives. It tells Jewish children: your people's understanding of your own heritage is illegitimate. Your grandparents' relationship to Israel is part of the power structure that you should be dismantling. The teacher in front of you has determined what being Jewish actually means — and your family got it wrong.
We have seen this move before. It has never ended well for Jews.
A genuine pedagogy of curiosity would have no pre-loaded conclusions in either circle. The fact that Padía's does — and that she published it apparently without awareness of what it reveals — tells you everything about the intellectual honesty of this enterprise.
The paper's very name for this framework — "pedagogical integrity" — is Orwellian. Integrity normally implies honesty, openness, fidelity to truth wherever it leads. Here it means ideological fidelity. It means having the courage of your pre-loaded conclusions. The name itself is propaganda.
There is a particular obscenity at the center of this paper that is worth isolating. Padía's framework rests on the claim that power is the fundamental axis of moral reality. Powerful people oppress powerless people. The powerless must be liberated. Teachers must help children identify who holds power and who is crushed by it.
Now consider who is the most powerful figure in a young child's life outside their parents. It is their teacher. Children cannot fact-check their teacher. They cannot resist their teacher's framing of reality. They cannot detect ideological loading in the vocabulary of love and justice and liberation. The teacher is, to a six-year-old, an authority as absolute and as trusted as gravity.
Padía knows this. Her entire paper depends on it. She says explicitly that teacher educators shape "the political imagination of the next generation." She is not unaware of the power she holds over young minds. She is banking on it.
And yet the content of what she wants transmitted through that unchallengeable authority is: powerful people are your enemy.
She wants to use total power over a child's developing mind to teach that child to fear power. She wants to exploit the most asymmetric power relationship in civilian life — credentialed adult authority over a trusting child who cannot yet read chapter books — to install suspicion of powerful people. Specifically, as we have seen, Jewish powerful people.
This is psychological projection in the clinical sense. She is doing to children exactly what she accuses "Zionist funders" of doing to universities — using institutional power to determine what thoughts are permissible. Except her targets are six years old who are the most powerless humans on the planet.
Education has one foundational purpose that distinguishes it from propaganda: it gives children the tools to eventually evaluate what their teachers told them. A real education plants the seeds of its own questioning. It hands children the instruments of their own intellectual liberation. What Padía proposes is the precise opposite. She wants to install conclusions so early, so authoritatively, and so emotionally — wrapped in the language of love, justice, and liberation — that they become part of the child's identity before the child has the cognitive capacity to examine them. By the time that child is old enough to think critically, the hatred will feel like conscience. The indoctrination will feel like awakening. The prejudice will feel like justice.
That is not education perverted. That is education destroyed and replaced with its photographic negative.
The power/powerless framework that runs through this paper presents itself as a tool for liberation. It is actually a trap — and this paper is the trap springing.
The world is not divided into the powerful and the powerless. Power is not a fixed substance held by permanent oppressors and permanently denied to permanent victims. It is dynamic, contextual, distributed, and transferable. People move between positions of power and vulnerability constantly, often simultaneously. The binary framework cannot tolerate this complexity because it is not actually a tool of analysis. It is a tool of mobilization. It sorts the world into heroes and villains, assigns permanent moral status to each, and then justifies whatever the heroes do as liberation and whatever the villains do as oppression — by definition, regardless of the specific action.
The result is visible throughout this paper. Padía holds extraordinary institutional power over her teacher candidates. She uses it to pre-load their conclusions, override their disagreements, work around the wishes of parents, and install a political identity in the children those candidates will teach. When a Jewish student pushes back, he is corrected. When a Palestinian mother asks for her child to be protected from political content, she is worked around. When a conference chair asks Padía to keep her presentation focused on her actual research topic and not to smuggle in anti-Zionist slides in a talk about bilingual education, it becomes an act of "compulsory Zionism" oppression.
Padia is guilty of what she accuses the "powerful" of doing. And this is clear from her own words.
This explains something that puzzles observers who watch anticolonial and "anti-oppression" movements metastasize into the very thing they claimed to oppose. It is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is the logical endpoint of the binary framework. If power is the problem, and you have defined yourself as outside power, then when you acquire power you cannot see it. Your framework has no instrument for detecting it. So you use it — on the most vulnerable people available, in this case children — while your theory assures you that you cannot possibly be doing what you are doing.
If Padía's goal were genuinely to teach children about suffering, power, displacement, and injustice, the curriculum she proposed would be broad. She might include the Uyghur cultural genocide — an ongoing campaign of mass incarceration, forced sterilization, and cultural erasure affecting over a million people. She might include the famine in the Sahel, North Korean prison camps, the Rohingya ethnic cleansing, the Iranian government's systematic murder of protesters who want to overthrow their own oppressive power.
None of these appear in this paper. None are proposed for early childhood curricula. The author does not argue that children should learn about suffering generally, or that a power-analysis lens should be applied to multiple conflicts. She argues that this specific conflict requires an ideological commitment as a precondition for teaching, that this specific conflict must be named in every lesson, every conference presentation, every syllabus.
This is not concern for children's education. It is a pathology of hate against nearly all of the committed Jews on the planet, a hate that Padia insists must be the central lesson to be taught to young children, as obligatory as reading or arithmetic.
Critical Education is a journal whose stated purpose is challenging the imposition of dominant ideological frameworks on students. It has just published a paper explicitly calling for the imposition of an ideological framework on students — on the youngest and most defenseless students — through the systematic training of an entire generation of teachers.
The contradiction is not incidental. It reflects a captured field. "Critical" in this context no longer means epistemically rigorous. It means politically aligned with a predetermined set of conclusions. In this captured field, the question is never whether to indoctrinate. It is only whose indoctrination counts as liberation.
The answer, in this paper and increasingly across this field, is the indoctrination that teaches children that Jews who support Jewish self-determination are the enemy.
This paper will be assigned in education courses. It will be cited in tenure dossiers. It will shape the pedagogy of teachers who will stand in front of children who trust them absolutely. It presents as a framework for humanization a program that is, in its bones, a mechanism for producing the next generation of people who have been carefully taught that Jewish power is the enemy of justice.
That this is considered normal academic discourse is not merely an outrage about one paper. It is a symptom of a field that has lost the thread of its own stated purpose — and the children, as always, will pay for it.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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