After the courts ruled that the content of controversial pro-trans and ‘sex positive’ sex education lessons may be kept secret from parents, MPs prepare to legislate to force disclosure. The Spectator leader column this week backs the move. Here’s an excerpt.
Rishi Sunak tends to shy away from social issues so it has been left to a backbencher, Miriam Cates, to introduce a Bill which would oblige schools to disclose to parents the materials which are being used in their children’s sex education classes.
The Bill is necessary because the Conservative Government has allowed sex education in many schools to be taken over by campaign groups with a radical agenda who wish to persuade children that it is wrong to think in a ‘heteronormative’ way.
The scandals that have recently surrounded schools reveal the scale and severity of the problem. Children have in some cases been taught that there are dozens, even hundreds, of different genders, and that somehow they must discern and choose their own. Some have been told that when talking or writing about historical figures they should always use ‘they’ because we don’t know a past person’s preferred pronouns. Muslim parents in particular have protested against their children being given ‘age-inappropriate’ information about sexual practices. They insist that parents should have a right to know what their children are being told.
The rise in the number of children claiming to be transgender seems to have caught the Government by surprise but, given what pupils are now being taught, it should not have done. One popular schoolbook, for instance, tells of a Cinderella-like figure who undergoes a successful gender realignment overnight with no complications and no regrets.
We have a brave London mother, Clare Page, to thank for finally bringing the scandal to light. Page asked to see what her daughters were learning in sex education but to her astonishment she was rebuffed by the school. She then complained to the academy trust which ran the school, and was briefly shown an extract on a laptop which confirmed that children were being taught a concept known as ‘sex positivity’. The trust refused to let her see any of the lesson plans in detail. Even after Page took the matter to the tribunal, she was still denied proper access to the materials. The tribunal ruled that the commercial interests of the School of Sexuality Education, the company which provided teaching materials on relationships and sex education to her daughters’ school, took precedence over parents’ rights to know what their children are being taught. This is an extraordinary development.
The arrival of online teaching materials has allowed a situation in which what children are taught can be kept a secret, with copyright laws used to enforce that secrecy.
The dangers of this ought to be apparent. Pressure groups on a mission to disrupt societal norms should not be allowed to provide sex education to young children. But the more fraught the whole subject becomes, the more eager schools are to contract out the whole business. Teacher training has anyway become politicised, and young teachers are often themselves indoctrinated with gender ideology. Last year Teach First announced proudly that it had won a gold award in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index.
The article concludes that “the Government has let down a generation of children in allowing ideologues to infiltrate lessons”.
“Backing Miriam Cates’s Bill to oblige schools to divulge teaching materials to parents would be a good start.”
Worth reading in full.
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But Bridgen’s Bill wasn’t good enough for them. Disgraceful.
It has nothing to do with the content, everything to do with further ostracising, demonising, ridiculing & insulting the man for speaking up for those unable to do so themselves.
Andrew himself is deemed too dangerous for anything which he proposes to be accepted.
The pushback from the moral cowards is because they don’t want to receive the same treatment & because he is shining a light on issues which they do not want the public to be aware of.
They’re scared.
Absolutely
Those involved should hang their heads in shame
Here’s a good idea: schools send all the next week’s lesson plans to parents on the Friday night. All classrooms have cameras put in them. Teachers have to wear microphones. All interactions with pupils must be recorded. Lessons are made available to stream or download at the end of the day. That way, pupils can check back if they need help with homework and parents can ensure their children are being properly taught and there’s no argument over whether a child is being picked on.
So basically Big Brother for schools – teaching is a fairly tough job as it is! (I’m not a teacher btw).
No choice really. I have teachers in my family who have told me that kids chant the Childline phone number at them when they try to make them behave. And I believe lessons should be recorded for the commonsense reason (going back to my own school days) that sometimes you need to confirm something you were taught earlier that day. If a kid is messing around in class, he can’t make allegations at the teacher in revenge. Equally, parents get to see how their children are being taught.
A new study finds trans people are at higher risk of dying by suicide than the rest of the population. Schools and parents that screw with kids and young people’s minds should face legal proceedings.
”Transgender people in Denmark have a significantly higher risk of suicide than other groups, according to an exhaustive analysis of health and legal records from nearly seven million people over the last four decades. The study is the first in the world to analyze national suicide data for this group.
Transgender people in the country had 7.7 times the rate of suicide attempts and 3.5 times the rate of suicide deaths compared with the rest of the population, according to the records analyzed in the study, though suicide rates in all groups decreased over time. And transgender people in Denmark died — by suicide or other causes — at younger ages than others.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/health/transgender-suicide-risk-denmark.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes
So sad. It has ever been thus that folk with psychiatric issues which aren’t addressed are more likely to commit suicide. Gender dysphoria is a psychiatric disorder which requires compassionate, empathetic treatment to understand how & why the individual got to where they are when they present in clinic. Not cutting & shutting them before disgorging them out into the world to carry on as though nothing has happened & all problems have magically disappeared.
As I’ve said before, all the men who presented in my clinic for voice therapy to change voice production to a more female pitch were deeply disturbed individuals who deserved care, compassion, understanding & support which treated them as an individual not another ‘case’ to be pushed through the protocol willy nilly. It was all men, never once had a woman undergoing a sex change (that’s what they were called back then).
My colleagues all said the same – some of the saddest cases we dealt with.
Quite right, BB.
Short version: People who can be talked into supposed sex changes by affirming their so-called gender identity really suffer from depression and similar disorders. That’s something people keen on harvesting whatever trans people potential a school might offer know very well themselves. Prey on the vulnerable, to put it in plain english.
Parents should have the right to demand sight of any and every school lesson being taught or proposed. And if a parent is not satisfied they should have the right to withdraw children. Yes this will generate chaos but if a government is committed to a proper education system it will ensure that such is provided and promptly.
Some of us know of course that disruption and ultimately destruction of a legitimate education system is actually the aim – got to get to the children early.
Parents are going to have to become more involved from day one. Also, all emails between staff in schools and between governors need to be made public. The public needs to know the thinking behind all decisions made in schools. A good start would be abolishing compulsory recognition of unions by schools. If a teacher goes on strike, a school should be allowed to fire him and hire someone else. Lawyers need to be put in their place too. A lot of this culture has been brought about by institutions being afraid of being sued by some well-funded TQIA+ human rights lawyer.
I agree Dom.
Put in their place a la Henry VI Part 2
The aim is to turn schools into even better indoctrination centres than we attended – we’ve all been indoctrinated to a greater or lesser degree. We’ve all been lied to by the state about everything.
But you’re right, the younger they can get their propaganda instilled into the children, the better for them.
Encouraging women to work after marriage & children was a means of doubling the tax take & of weakening family bonds. This diabolical agenda has been long in the planning.
Yes, there was so much critical theory bullcrap I was taught even in the 1980s. I look at my education as a gigantic grooming operation which led to my generation ultimately being duped to vote for Blair in 1997. The ray of hope is that I turned my back on such ideology and am utterly opposed to it now.
Agreed! I’m of a similar vintage but had a visceral reaction to Bliar – felt nauseous whenever I saw/heard him – still happens. Wouldn’t have made much difference as it’s basically the same donkey but with a different coloured rosette…
Took me until summer 2020 to start to awaken from my slumber. Boy have I come a long way since!! Full on antivaxxer (including for animals), pro individual sovereignty, pro personal responsibility & determined to prevent even more children from being damaged by the grooming, pharma, media, fake foods etc.
Bit of a nightmare for the Establishment!
Amen Bertie! Be ungovernable!
I became strongly anti-Blair within weeks of him assuming power. I have a visceral reaction to most politicians now. I realised I had been duped by New Labour very quickly and began searching for something that would clarify what I believed in and why.
I was lucky: I discovered Ayn Rand in my 30s – the fiction and non-fiction stuff. It’s not that I adopted Objectivism as a belief – I didn’t – but I learnt about things like reason, objectivity, romanticism versus realism. Atlas Shrugged also anticipated most of the ills of the present day, including BlackRock’s much-vaunted stakeholder capitalism. Ayn Rand was a major teacher for me about important concepts in the world and led me to other writers.
Once I got interested in philosophy, beyond writers such as Aristotle, I started reading people like Roger Scruton – England: An Elegy is a fantastic book – then economists such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Henry Hazlitt. Paul Kingsnorth is an interesting modern British philosophical voice. Reading Niall Ferguson’s biography of Henry Kissinger meant I had to read a primer on the dreaded Immanuel Kant (by Roger Scruton no less!)
It became clear that my secondary education – at a minor private school on an assisted place – was a waste of money for the most part. I hadn’t been taught anything of worth in the humanities subjects and much of it was based in postmodernism and critical theory. Ayn Rand said the West was collapsing under bad philosophy, which I agree with. It’s not taught properly: bad philosophy is slipped into every non-science subject and young people are denied any clarity about how to perceive, comprehend or function in the world, which suits the elites very well.
That is some education you gave yourself!
I’m a latecomer to all of this – too busy juggling a stressful, high pressure, emotionally draining job of neuro rehab in the NHS & keeping up with the latest research with a family & a needy ex spouse to have even considered looking further than what was in front of me.
Done an awful lot of catching up!! We need to keep sharing what we know & keep being supportive of each other to enable us to sow seeds of truth to hopefully help others think, become curious & ultimately learn for themselves how badly the state has treated us & how little they care for our welfare despite all the warm words & lies they spout.
The only reason the copyright and commercial confidentiality issues are being raised is because the sickos who are responsible for this garbage, scuttling around in darkness, know they cannot face daylight. Just as with pharma companies seeking indemnity.
If I had school-age children, they’d be unavoidably missing from the PHSE Indoctrination classes: urgent medical/dental treatment or a sudden migraine.