It’s not a word most parents have heard. It’s “adultism,” and if you’ve set curfews, questioned your teenager’s medical decisions, or told your kid they can’t dress a certain way, congratulations: you’re guilty of it.
That’s not an exaggeration. It’s the curriculum.
PragerU CEO Marissa Streit sat down with Fox News Digital this week to walk through what she called a coordinated push to import radical ideology into public schools under the cover of “ethnic studies.” She held up a teacher training manual called “Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators,” published by AK Press, and read from it on camera. The book, she said, promotes anti-capitalism, Critical Race Theory, and what it frames as resistance to adult authority. One passage she quoted: “Adultism teaches us that adults have the power and the right to decide what young people’s boundaries should be.”
The term “adultism” has an academic pedigree. Sociologists coined it decades ago to describe genuine age discrimination against minors in institutional contexts. But Streit argues it’s been stripped of that technical meaning and repurposed in these training programs to cast ordinary parenting as tyranny. Telling your child not to dress a certain way. Setting limits on relationships. Weighing in on a major medical decision. In the language of these curricula, that’s “fascism.”
The Washington Times independently reviewed Streit’s warning against documented examples. One confirms the concern isn’t hypothetical. A workshop held at a San Francisco public high school, titled “Youth as Knowledge Producers: Challenging Adult Supremacy Through Ethnic Studies,” told attendees that “the relationship between students and educators is an oppressive one,” casting teachers as oppressors and students as the oppressed. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on it in June. The school district said it didn’t sponsor the event, which is a carefully constructed answer that leaves open whether they permitted it, publicized it, or allowed school grounds to host it.
This connects to a broader legal battle that conservatives have largely been winning, even if the war isn’t over.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that Maryland parents had the right to opt their children out of lessons conflicting with their religious beliefs. The ruling was a significant win. But the teachers unions drew their own line. The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union in the country with 1.8 million members, passed a resolution this year opposing parental-notification policies when a student socially transitions at school. The AFT calls it protecting students from “forced outing.” It explicitly frames the policy against the backdrop of President Trump’s executive order defining sex along biological lines.
What’s most telling about the “adultism” push is the mechanism. These ideas don’t arrive in a memo to parents. They arrive in professional development sessions for teachers, in training manuals that most parents never see, in frameworks that become embedded in lesson planning before any school board votes on them. By the time a concerned parent shows up at a meeting, the training has already happened.
That’s the pattern: transform the teacher first, let the classroom follow.
Whether parents can fight it depends on whether they know it’s happening. That’s why the parental-notification battles matter so much. If schools can withhold information about what’s being taught and what’s being done with their children during the school day, parents can’t push back. That’s not an accident. It’s the point.
