The Defense Department runs kindergartens?

OPINION:

With less than a week on the job under his belt, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been directed by President Trump to pursue school choice, an issue that seems far outside the Pentagon’s traditional purview.

Yet the Defense Department is involved in more educational activities than expected. Through a program called the DODEA, it teaches roughly 66,000 K-12 children of active-duty and civilian members of the armed forces at $2.25 billion annually. The department also manages the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy.

More conventional defense secretaries with more conventional qualifications have long ignored the Defense Department’s sizable education portfolio, happy to focus on issues that would cause only ripples in the glassy bureaucratic sea over at the Pentagon. But as Mr. Hegseth’s co-author in our book, “Battle for the American Mind,” I think Mr. Hegseth was chosen precisely because he has the skill and the transformative vision to turn the Defense Department’s comfortable complacency into a tempest of reform and efficiency.

In our book, Mr. Hegseth and I wrote about the threat of Marxist teachers and partisan ideologues who teach our children to reject patriotism and embrace far-left social justice activism. This includes the DODEA and the U.S. military academies.

Over the past four years, the DODEA director has been an avowed social justice warrior named Tom Brady. Mr. Brady said diversity, equity and inclusion should be “embedded in everything we do.” Mr. Brady appointed a DEI leader who described herself as a “woke administrator.” When this scandal was uncovered, the DODEA shut down its DEI office only to resurrect the ideology behind closed doors. For example, the DODEA still peddles equity and anti-racism in teacher training and retains an internal DEI steering committee.

The U.S. military academies are no better. At West Point, students have been instructed in critical race theory. They are fed propaganda about Whiteness, structural racism and “modern-day slavery in the USA.” The Naval Academy adopted anti-White racial preferences in its admissions, eschewing meritocracy in favor of DEI. In the thrall of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the Naval Academy superintendent mandated diversity training for all students, faculty and staff. Meanwhile, the Air Force Academy, bowing to the transgender craze, trained cadets to stop using terms such as “mom” and “dad.”

These scandals are much more consequential than normal culture war skirmishes. Wokeness — with its attendant critical theory, diversity training and perennial accusations of systemic racism — trains people to condemn America as irredeemably bigoted and hateful.

When our education system teaches students to hate America, that becomes a national security issue. When those students are future military officers in the case of the academies or the close relatives of military members in the case of the DODEA — a group that comprises a majority of generational recruits in the armed services — this national security issue becomes a full-blown crisis.

If Mr. Hegseth’s past advocacy against wokeness and zeal for education reform is any prologue, big changes may be coming to the Pentagon-managed education systems. These changes will start with giving our armed service members school choice. This would restrain politicized Defense Department bureaucrats from meddling where they don’t belong and put education in the hands of parents, where it should be. When you sign up to serve our nation, you shouldn’t have to turn over your children to Uncle Sam. Plus, surveys show that service members would be far more likely to remain in the service with more educational choices.

Mr. Hegseth can use his authority to restore high academic standards and merit to the U.S. military academies. Racial admission preferences, as well as woke coursework and training, should be removed. As Mr. Hegseth and I wrote in our book, schools, including the military academies, should adopt the Classic Learning Test in their application processes to measure readiness for college. This test returns to tried-and-true academic measures without the biases and declining standards of tests such as the College Board’s SAT.

If I know Mr. Hegseth, he will gladly implement Mr. Trump’s order to bring school choice to the Defense Department, but education reformers should buckle up. That will only be the beginning.

• David Goodwin is president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools and co-author of the book “Battle for the American Mind” with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.