I didn’t need a curriculum to tell my four‑year‑old that people are different. He sees it before breakfast—at the shoe pile by the door: tiny red sneakers beside size‑12 boots. Different hair. Different voices. He notices, then looks up at me to learn what difference means. That second part—what we model in the space after noticing—is where a culture is made or unmade.

Lately, we’re teaching something else. We’re training children (and the adults who teach them) to scan the room for harm and punish first, ask later. We call it care. We call it safety. It often looks like neither. It’s control, dressed up in compassion.

The truth is simple: awareness is innate. Suspicion is learned. And suspicion is being taught.

[…]

In this article, DEI is shorthand for that identity‑centric, punitive frame now moving through schools and institutions […] where this frame rules, the outcomes below tend to follow: more reports, more punishments, colder rooms—and children who learn to distrust their own eyes.

We used to teach kids how to live with difference—how to hold their shape and still be kind; how to argue an idea without exiling a person; how to say, “I might be wrong,” and mean it. Now, in the name of anti‑oppression, we’re giving them a lens that pre‑loads malice into ordinary friction. A clumsy question becomes an incident. An awkward moment becomes a microaggression. Disagreement becomes harm.

[…]

I’m not handing my child’s conscience to a committee. […] I will model tolerance—the grown‑up version that holds fierce differences without exile—and I’ll teach him to do the same. Because if our antidote to prejudice is teaching kids to hunt for it, we’ll raise sharp detectives and poor neighbours. I want something better: citizens. Neighbors. Men and women with a spine and a heart.