When a senator claims the House killed a bill out of spite, the charge deserves an answer — not because the grievance is interesting, but because the truth is different, and the difference matters.
The story broke on the X platform, following an allegation from Senator Sullivan. The House, it was said, sank the Senator’s play-based education bill in revenge — payback for the long column of good House bills the Senate had buried of late. Tit for tat. It is a tidy narrative, but one that happens to be false.
I am in a position to say so. I was close enough to deliberations to know its anatomy from the inside. I was not personally one of its drivers either way. I had no companion bill riding on the outcome, no trade to protect, and the opposition arose long before the Senate killed several of my own bills. I am, in this instance, a witness rather than an interested party, and a witness is exactly what the spite theory cannot survive. They did it not in spite, but because they read what was in front of them and did not like what they read. That is not malice. That is the job.
But the accusation nagged at me, because it carried a quiet insult — the suggestion that we shirked our responsibility to help children out of a petty grudge. So, I went back to the source material the bill leaned on as provided by the Senator. What I found is damning for the “revenge” allegation.
The pedagogy the bill would have imported education mandates under the title A Pedagogy of Play, a 2023 product of Harvard’s Project Zero. A rather obvious heuristic for a legislator should be to notice who paid for it. The eight-year research effort behind the book was underwritten by the LEGO Foundation — a Danish corporate foundation that in a single recent year disbursed grants on the order of four hundred forty million dollars to push one idea, “learning through play,” into school systems across the world through partnerships with UNICEF, the World Economic Forum, and the OECD. We are entitled to ask why a foreign toy company’s charitable arm is the financier of the framework a New Hampshire bill would import into our classrooms in conjunction with the UN and WEF.
The second thing to note is the word “Pedagogy”. It promises a settled science. The method beneath it is what the authors call “playful participatory research” — which is to say, action research conducted at four schools that its own designers chose precisely because those schools already practiced what the study set out to praise. No control groups. No standardized measures of what children actually learned. No replication by anyone with the standing to disconfirm it. This is a thin, scientifically legitimated program, not real science. It is an advertisement with a Harvard seal. The hard science cuts against these claims and this program. (As an aside, the “Science in Education Act” I’ve introduced, unsuccessfully, several times now would remedy these fake-science problems we have).
The book is candid, to its credit, about what it is really doing. It grounds itself openly in “socio-constructivist” theory — the school descended from the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who set out quite deliberately to build a Marxist psychology — and in the Reggio Emilia approach, which grew up in postwar Italy under a communist municipal government and a founder who worked within the Italian Communist Party. It rejects what it calls the model of the child as an empty vessel to be filled — Paulo Freire’s idea is clearly present as paraphrase, though carefully not cited given the exposure the Brazilian Marxist has received for his influence on American education. It instructs teachers to put children “in charge,” to “welcome all emotions,” and to send them out believing they hold “the power to change the world.” Project Zero’s own description lists among its aims the advancement of “social justice and equity.” It is a program aimed at manufacturing Leftist activists. Harvard, the claimed impetus for the bill, stands as a wretched hive of villainy in education and several other fields by importing Marxist frameworks into American institutions (education, law, and public health are notable).
These are not academic skills. They are dispositions — a vision of the child, of authority, and of the good. Forming that vision is the work of parents, and the institutions parents choose, not of the state and a foreign foundation acting through it. I have written elsewhere, at length, about the longer genealogy of this machinery — including the documented fact that the social-emotional-learning apparatus now woven through our schools traces to a 1994 meeting at the explicitly occult Fetzer Institute. This was a significant part of my book, Counterspell.
The bill died because thoughtful members looked at a pseudoscience-driven, foreign-funded, Leftist-value-laden framework dressed as settled science, saw it for the explicitly Progressive and implicitly Marxist program that it is, and declined to recommend passage as written. That is not revenge. That is the deliberative process doing exactly what it is built to do. That is how the members of the House Education Policy Committee have consistently operated this session. I am not certain the Senate can claim the same virtue.
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