Crusade in the Classroom: What the Pentagon Wants to Teach 70,000 Children

At the schools the U.S. Department of Defense runs for military families, a course will begin this fall that puts Western civilization and Christianity at the center. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calls it classical education and patriotic values. The curriculum itself reads more like religious doctrine pretending to be science.

The agency in charge runs around 160 schools in 11 countries and teaches about 70,000 children whose parents serve in uniform or work as civilian employees of the military. These schools belong directly to the federal government, not to local communities, and that is exactly what makes them so tempting to conservatives, an education system without the friction of local school boards, where they can demonstrate what America's classrooms are supposed to look like in the future. A testing ground under orders. What works here is supposed to become a model for the country's public schools. A soldier's child has no school district to switch to and no parent board that can object.

As a required textbook in government-run schools, it is highly problematic, precisely because it does not simply tell history, but presents a clearly judgmental idea of what "the West" is and where its enemies supposedly stand.

At the center is a textbook from the conservative publisher Encounter Books, "The Golden Thread," the golden thread of the Western tradition, Volume 1, the ancient world and Christendom. The lesson plans were developed with Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian college in Michigan that for years has supplied the American right with material for the culture war in the classroom. The thread begins in antiquity, and, according to the book, it runs straight to the cross.

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Historians who reviewed excerpts say the book distorts historical events in places, nearly equates the West with Christianity and paints Islam as a threat to both. "You have to ask whether Western civilization here isn't really a Trojan horse for classical Christian education," says Phil Gorski, a sociologist at Yale University. Classical education originally meant teaching the liberal arts, training judgment and civic sense and measuring students against the great orators. In this version, the canon shrinks to the Greeks and Romans, plus a few Western descendants, while what Asia and Africa produced, and the Middle East with them, remains in the dark. The talk about teaching judgment sounds good until you read which judgments have already been decided. A book that determines in advance whom students are supposed to distrust trains them to fear instead of teaching them to think.

Conservative politicians have embraced classical education as the Trump administration and Republican-led states have pushed schools to emphasize patriotism and play down the darker chapters of their own history. History taught this way becomes a mirror that gives the viewer back a cleaned-up face instead of a window into the past. Hegseth was already calling for children to receive a classical Christian education before he took office. In his 2022 book, written when he was a former television host, he portrays progressive forces as having driven God out of the schools; parents who did not send their child to a classical Christian school, he wrote, were admitting defeat. "With this approach, we lose. We lose America and Western civilization," he writes.

Not everyone in that camp shares the battle language. Susan Wise Bauer, author of a well-known classical homeschool curriculum, describes a fight over which texts even count. The moment an education system runs on the impulse that "this is us, and those people over there are the others," the shared literary inheritance becomes a weapon. That exact impulse has been built into the structure of the new course.

High school students can take it as "Western Civilization to 1500" and use it to fulfill their world history requirement, offered through the department's virtual school. The introduction sets the tone: Without knowledge of their own history, the authors write, citizens stand "defenseless against the general hostility toward their own tradition" that is supposedly so destructive today. It is the language of siege, the heritage under threat, the next generation defenseless unless it is armed in time with the right canon. Curtis Dozier, a classics professor at Vassar College, sees in it the widespread fear on the right that immigrants are coming to replace the country's culture with their own.

The intention becomes clearest when Islam appears. The book calls it inherently more violent than Christianity, describes Arabs in the Middle Ages as bitter toward Christians and Jews and recasts the Crusades as protection for fellow believers. To make its case, the text jumps into the present day, to the September 11 attacks and the Hamas attack of October 7. At one point it says radical terrorists committed atrocities "that were welcomed by a depressingly large number of ordinary Muslims." One sentence turns a billion believers into people somehow in on it. Among those 70,000 children are also the sons and daughters of soldiers who serve alongside Muslim allies or are Muslim themselves. The government is now telling them in class that their religion is the religion of the enemy.

Matthew Gabriele, a historian at Virginia Tech, does not consider that scholarship. He says the presentation leaves out context in order to portray Islam as aggressive while toning down the violence of the Christian church. The book, he says, serves a political purpose by constantly reaching into the 21st century and doing so only when it helps its own case. Publisher Roger Kimball responds that 15 experts reviewed the work and that he stands behind every detail. Co-author James Hankins, emeritus at Harvard and now at a conservatively backed school at the University of Florida, denies that the book equates Christianity with the West; parts of it, he says, acknowledge what the West owes to the Islamic world. Until the 1970s, studying one's own civilization was taken for granted, China studies its own as well, he argues, and he calls the move away from that foolish. People no longer know where they come from, he complains; the course answers the question with a single permitted origin.

The course is only the most visible part. Department of Defense Education Activity schools are specifically hiring teachers for classical education, and people from that same movement have been moved into leadership until the school system's top ranks were almost entirely drawn from the classical Christian world. In March, the department abruptly replaced its leadership, putting Director Paul Craft in place of Beth Schiavino-Narvaez, with Hegseth praising him as the right man to steer the system toward patriotic values and classical education. The top academic job went to Tiffany Hoben, who previously oversaw a curriculum in Florida's Education Department under Governor Ron DeSantis that questioned the separation of church and state. Matthew Kirby became regional director for the Americas, while his main job is running Liberty Classical Schools, a network of charter schools based in Atlanta.

The administration is pulling the military into its vision of education elsewhere as well. The service academies now accept the Classical Learning Test, a classically oriented alternative to the SAT. Last year, the civil rights group ACLU sued the school system after it removed hundreds of books from shelves dealing with race and gender, along with democracy. First the uncomfortable books disappear, then the one book that already knows all the answers moves in. The Pentagon did not respond to specific questions about the book or the shift in curriculum, saying only that it remained committed to providing the best possible education.

In his speeches, Hegseth draws a straight line from the country's founding through the West to early Christianity, which he sees as surrounded by enemies; America, he says, was founded as a Christian nation, and the soldier should profess faith in God. Last September, during an appearance on civic education, he attributed the genius of the Founding Fathers to divine inspiration and said it was no accident. Paul Craft passed the message along internally, saying they should bring the best of private classical schools into their own public system.

The golden thread they put into children's hands does not lead them out of the labyrinth. One end is tied down, and it ends where Hegseth has anchored it, with God and a West that must defend itself against an eternal enemy. A curriculum that already knows its answer before the first class even begins has nothing left in common with education except the name.