In a nutshell, this book is a comprehensive study of all the ways the Left is poisoning the minds of schoolchildren and making their lives miserable. Mandel and Markowicz do a masterful job in covering all the bases, from the blatantly political dictates of the education establishment and teachers’ unions during the pandemic to the clandestine promotion of the transgender agenda.

During their research for the book, the authors interviewed parents, teachers, school administrators, and medical personnel, including physicians, therapists, psychiatrists, and others. They reviewed numerous news articles and reports.

Many parents they spoke to admitted they were “clueless” about what their children were learning before the pandemic. One parent reported she had no idea what her then-seventh-grade daughter was learning in health class. “[The course] gave these kids highly sexualized labels. It was nonsense: polyamorous, bi-gender, etc., a whole list of made-up words. And the eleven- and twelve-year-old girls picked a label; it became cool. Nobody wanted to be the cis-basic kid. That is boring. And not only is it boring. For a white, affluent kid who wants for nothing, [she didn’t] want to be the oppressor, which is what they’re being taught in school. They have to pick something that marginalizes them.”

In that health class, nearly half the girls “came out” as something other than what they were, starting off as lesbian, then non-binary, and finally deciding they were transgender. This particular child went down the rabbit hole — running the gamut of the transgender experience, from the school affirming her new name and pronouns to therapists who reinforced her whim that she was transgender. But she was fortunate to have a mother who refused to go along with the charade and successfully fought to bring her child back.

Stolen Youth is divided into chapters written by each author. Bethany Mandel wrote the Introduction, along with Chapters 4 through 7 and Chapter 9. Karol Markowicz penned Chapters 1 through 3, as well as Chapter 8. Both authors contributed to the Conclusion, and in general the book is surprisingly seamless and easy to read.

Markowicz was born in Soviet Russia and came to America with her family in 1978. Her family’s history is fraught with harrowing experiences under totalitarianism, which makes her uniquely qualified to recognize the parallels in today’s America. In Chapter 1, she shows how the manipulation of our schoolchildren is similar to the tactics used one hundred years ago in Stalin’s Russia, and today in Communist China. She contends that while we are not to that point yet, we are drawing perilously close to the precipice.

“In totalitarian societies, parents have to pretend to believe the lies that kids are taught at school, lest they make themselves or their children a target,” Markowicz writes. “In a free country, you don’t have to do that. You can and should explain to children that life isn’t black and white and that American history is complicated. You can and should reassert the morals that matter in your family. You can and should teach your child to be himself or herself and not be coerced into other people’s opinions. Whose kid is this? In the home, you provide the answer: mine.”

Mandel is an author, journalist, and homeschooling mom. She is editor of the Heroes of Liberty book series, which Education Reporter reviewed in 2021. While the Left describes “woke” ideology as an awareness “of social issues such as racial prejudice and discrimination,” Mandel asserts that the reality “is much more complex—and much more ominous. The reality is that conformist, woke ideology is taking over our institutions, and this takeover of every aspect of our lives, from medical and mental healthcare to our media and entertainment, touches every single American—those who buy into the ideology and the many of us who don’t.”

She describes in detail the woke takeover of libraries, and the perversion of Scholastic, one of the nation’s largest publishing houses, with a magazine that was a fixture in schools, libraries, and home mailboxes for decades. Now, writes Mandel, Scholastic “has an entire featured section on their website devoted to ‘LGBTQIA+’ topics.” But hypersexualizing children is not enough, she writes. “The other main focus is on making kids hyperaware of race, often through a critical race theory (CRT) lens.”

Perhaps the most sobering of Mandel’s chapters is “The Peril of Woke Medicine” (Chapter 5) in which she covers the politicization of the medical field. Especially troubling is her demonstrably provable point that, led by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the specialty of pediatrics “is among the most Left-leaning medical specialties, along with psychiatry and epidemiology.” This section alone should give every reader pause.

She further describes how medical research has become more like activism, and shows how medical professionals’ terror of “being offensive to patients doesn’t just impact healthcare outcomes in the short term but also changes how children and teenagers optimize their behavior for their own health.” Instead of being encouraged to make healthy choices through diet and exercise, for example, they are given external excuses for their bad health outcomes; i.e., they are victims of racism, poverty, or some other cultural offense beyond their control.

This wokeness extends to the field of surgery, with the American College of Surgeons (ACS) doing such things as sponsoring a lecture that “made no mention of excellence” but instead “was filled with buzzwords like diversity, inclusion, equity, biases of various sorts, and microaggressions” as problems facing surgery training and the ACS. But as Mandel observes: “When your child suffers from a condition requiring the expertise of a surgeon, the knowledge that the person holding the knife in the operating room was trained in this kind of environment is terrifying.”

Another chapter worthy of note is “Child Soldiers” (Chapter 8), in which Markowicz shows how children are being used to further the Marxist goals of adults. Two examples include the grooming of school shooting survivors to push for gun control, and the emphasis of climate change propaganda to scare children and turn them into climate activists. Markowicz tells the familiar story of Greta Thunberg’s rise to fame and how her story has been used to influence countless schoolchildren in the name of “science.”

Markowicz writes: “What went ignored about the actual Greta is how deeply scarred she was because of her obsession with climate change. Greta had detailed her deep depression before starting her movement. It’s no surprise that her followers exhibit the same struggles with mental health. But, like everything else, this fact was used to further support the woke cause rather than as a sign to examine whether political activism is good for children’s wellbeing.”

Both Mandel and Markowicz provide encouragement in the final chapter and the Conclusion, along with personal advice and perspective from their own lives. Their message is that human beings are resilient and the future hopeful, despite the efforts of current trends and influences to discourage independent thought and promote eternal victimhood.

While most of the high-profile topics of CRT, transgenderism, and other woke items contained in Stolen Youth have been well covered in Education Reporter and elsewhere, this reviewer found the book to be highly informative and filled with insights that only these two authors could supply. It is a perfect resource for readers seeking a comprehensive overview of the evil forces stacked against ordinary kids, parents, and citizens today, and the authors finish by offering a blueprint for pulling out of the rat race.

To read the entire book, go here to order!

The Education Reporter Book Review is a project of America’s Future, Inc. To find out more about America’s Future, visit AmericasFuture.net.

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