The Education Department and State Department sent letters to American schools and universities, alerting them to the Chinese government’s “real and growing threat” to students, the Clarion Project reported.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos wrote the letters on Oct. 9 to state education commissars and administrators at the elementary and secondary school levels, as well as at the university level.
They warn that the “Confucius Classrooms” program uses a curriculum developed by the People’s Republic of China and teachers who were instructed by the PRC.
“Styled as a language and culture program, Confucius Classrooms are in reality an important element of the PRC’s global influence campaign, now reaching tens of thousands of U.S. schoolchildren every day,” Pompeo and DeVos wrote.
Many education administrators do not know that teachers are indoctrinating their students with the Chinese Communist Party‘s propaganda. The CCP vets, supplies resources and pays the teachers who teach the Confucius Classroom material.
Some administrators, however, have been flattered and fed propaganda.
The Chinese Communist Party hosted 172 influential American educational officials at the 2019 Chinese Bridge for American Principals, a program designed to bring Chinese teachers and influence into the United States, the Confucius Institute Headquarters reported.
“The presence of an authoritarian slant in curriculum and teaching has never been more concerning, nor more consequential,” Pompeo and DeVos wrote.
The Cabinet secretaries warn that these programs could influence public opinion about China’s ongoing abuse of dissenters and minorities.
“The government of the PRC has suppressed human rights and freedoms in Hong Kong; intensified longstanding repression of ethnic and linguistic minorities in the so-called ‘autonomous regions’ of Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and elsewhere; and is believed to be engaged in the world’s largest internment of a religious minority since the Second World War in the ‘autonomous region’ of Xinjiang,” Pompeo and DeVos wrote.
Some former Chinese nationalists, who fled the nation for the shelter of America’s Constitution, now see that the PRC has “effectively taken up a physical presence in the halls of their child’s U.S. school.”
Other Western nations have removed Confucius classrooms from their schools, like New South Wales in Australia and the New Brunswick province of Canada, or refused their admission in the first place, like Toronto, Canada.
Pompeo and DeVos said American administrators and state boards should design their own curriculums to educate students about Chinese culture, government, language and religion, without failing to include material about the nation’s inhuman practices.
The State Department labeled the Confucius Institute’s U.S. Center, which is located in Washington, D.C., “as a People’s Republic of China foreign mission controlled by a foreign government,” in an Aug. 18 2020 State Department letter.
Confucius Classrooms themselves have not been declared as foreign programs.
On university campuses, Confucius Classrooms have posed a significant threat to the American way of life for years, but little has been done to address them.
“Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom,” the American Association of University Professors wrote in 2014.
The Chinese Communist Party’s spy program, in which Chinese nationals steal knowledge from American universities, is also part of the CCP’s “increasingly aggressive posture” and control of Chinese students.
