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A school is captured when it stops teaching children how to think and starts training them what to think.

That is the simplest way to understand the fight now opening inside many South African schools, and especially its elite private ones. The issue is not whether children should be exposed to political and ideological ideas. The issue is whether schools exist to educate children to think about competing ideas, or to induct them into a specific ideological programme.

That is the danger of school capture. It happens when reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, discipline, memory, argument, character, and judgement are pushed behind a political project. It happens when the school no longer sees the child as a mind to be formed, but as a political subject to be indoctrinated.

Education, as it should be practised, gives children the tools with which to judge the world. Indoctrination gives children the judgement before they have acquired the tools. Education says read this, examine that, test the claim, weigh the evidence, consider the counterargument, and then decide. Indoctrination says this is the moral framework, this is the approved language, these are the guilty groups, these are the victim groups, and your job is to locate yourself accordingly.

Once that distinction is lost, schooling becomes dangerous.

This new form of school capture is often dressed up in the soft language of inclusion, equity, transformation, anti-discrimination, decolonisation, and social justice. These are attractive words. They are designed to be attractive. But words can conceal as much as they reveal. “Equity” no longer necessarily means fairness before the rules. It increasingly means managed outcomes. “Inclusion” no longer necessarily means treating every child as equally valuable. It can mean compelling children to accept a political theory about identity, power, guilt, and history. “Anti-racism” no longer means rejecting racial judgement. It can mean making race the first, most important, and most permanent fact about every child in the room, and then breaking down any institution of society, from free speech to capitalism and markets, that is alleged to underpin it.

The playbook is well rehearsed.

An incident of racism is engineered and then blown out of all proportion. On the back of that, a literal coterie of consultants, workshops, teacher training sessions, new reading lists, anti-discrimination codes, and parent committees is set in motion in an effort to demonstrate a genuine sense of institutional remorse and self-correction.

In short order, the school in question is forced to onboard a new ideology along the lines that racism is an institutionalised aspect of especially elite Western institutions. These institutions act, wittingly or otherwise, to preserve a status quo in which white perpetrators lord it over black victims. The school in question, and the community it represents, is thereby split into these competing and adversarial camps. Questioning the new ideology is met with accusations of seeking to defend the old order. Presenting facts to the contrary is as heinous, as such facts are held simply to be the product of an inherently illegitimate system and therefore not to have any analytical value.

Teachers may not necessarily believe in the ideology being piped into their school, but they may fear losing their jobs if they challenge it. That is one of the clearest signs of capture. A healthy school can tolerate disagreement. A captured school cannot. A healthy school trusts teachers to exercise judgement. A captured school forces them to recite doctrine. A healthy school welcomes parents into debate. A captured school treats dissenting parents as a problem to be managed.

With the teachers cowed and corralled, the same begins to happen with the pupils. Black student unions are formed, and affinity groups along lines of gender and sexuality are formed that literally groom children into all manner of anti-social behaviours.

Within these groups, school programmes separate children by race and then ask them to examine themselves through the categories of privilege, guilt, oppression, whiteness, victimhood, and inherited responsibility. White children may be pushed to search themselves for hidden racism. Black children are encouraged to see themselves through the lens of permanent injury. Children may be asked, explicitly or implicitly, to confess a political condition they did not choose, cannot escape, and are too young to understand. Teenagers going through puberty and confused by the consequences are encouraged to experiment with alternative genders and sexualities.

A school should never teach a child that guilt lives inside them because of their skin colour. It should never teach one child that victimhood is their permanent inheritance and another that guilt is theirs. It should never ask children to confess inherited political sin. It should never replace personal responsibility with racial destiny. It certainly has no place encouraging children to pursue risky sexual and gender experimentation.

Children are not racial or sexual case studies. They are not ideological raw material. They are not vessels into which adult resentments should be poured. They are young minds trying to understand themselves, their families, their country, their duties, their talents, their limits, and their place in the world.

Parents, often working stressful and demanding jobs, and with a naïve sense that the elite education they are paying for must surely have the best interests of the child at heart, are either too distant or too badly informed to counter the expert ideological efforts of the consultants and their in-house champions who are driving the capture of the minds of the children. Those who become concerned and do ask serious questions are often either guilted into silence or simply “managed” as a problem and example of the old order the school’s ideologues have taken upon themselves to break down.

The ensuing damage is psychological to the point of stunting the mental and emotional development of a child. The psychological damage manifests each time a child is taught to surrender their individuality before it has properly formed. Instead of being encouraged to become a responsible person with agency, conscience, courage, discipline, and the ability to judge others by their conduct, the child is trained to see themselves first as a racial or political or sexual category in which white, straight, conservative thinkers are degenerate perpetrators of oppression and black, gay, progressive thinkers are their permanent victims.

One child is burdened with inherited guilt, another with inherited grievance, and both are denied the dignity of moral freedom. In such a classroom, resentment can replace responsibility, suspicion can replace friendship, and ideological performance can replace honest thought. The child learns not to ask what is true, but what is permitted. They learn not to build character, but to locate themselves inside a map of power, privilege, victimhood, and blame. At its worst, this does not produce a wiser or more compassionate child. It produces a narrowed, anxious, rehearsed child whose mind has been captured before it has been allowed to grow.