“Brussels doesn’t believe its policies have failed: it believes you are the problem”—Sociologist Ashley Frawley
28th December 2025
Education has become one of the main ideological battlegrounds across the Western world and particularly within the European Union. Although the EU treaties recognise education as a national competence, in recent years Brussels has developed an increasingly sophisticated architecture of programmes, funding streams and partnerships with NGOs aimed at exerting direct influence over what happens in classrooms—especially in areas related to identity, gender and sexuality.
It is in this context that the report Indoctrinating Children: How Brussels Embeds Gender Identity in the Classroom, published by MCC Brussels and authored by sociologist Ashley Frawley, must be understood. The study documents how millions of euros from programmes such as Erasmus+, CERV, and Horizon are channelled into activist-designed educational projects, which are then promoted as ‘best practice’ at the European level—even in countries where such policies have been explicitly rejected by national parliaments or parents.
Frawley, a researcher and author specialising in the analysis of contemporary social problems and the growing use of ‘behaviour change’ as a political tool, warns that these are neither isolated nor benign initiatives. Rather, she argues, they form a coherent project of social engineering. In an interview with europeanconservative.com, she unpacks Brussels’ underlying motivations, the mechanisms used to circumvent subsidiarity, and the democratic consequences of a strategy that, in her view, seeks to “reform the citizen” from childhood.