The recent introduction of a radical sex education curriculum by California’s Board of Education has roused the ire of parents across the state, and ought to serve as a strong warning to the rest of the country.
Books for 8-year olds with illustrations of genitalia during intercourse and sex-education for high school students with how-to guides on how to perform unspeakable acts are just a couple of the components of the terrifying curriculum.
Parents who think that they can keep this material away from their children, in California or anywhere else, should probably be aware of just how entrenched the progressive plan for public education is, and also just how far they are planning to go in the indoctrination of our children.
The best book I’ve read on the subject was published less than a year ago. In it, the authors make a compelling case to public school parents that the best thing you can do for your school-age children is “Get Out Now” (Regnery Publishing, $25.99) — the book’s arresting title.
Meticulously researched by Mary Hasson and Theresa Farnon, two professional women working in the policy arena and academia, “Get Out Now” takes readers through the depressing statistics of an education system that spends more money per student than most countries, yet has managed to make less than half of eighth-graders proficient in reading.
But as it turns out, a poor grounding in the “three R’s” is the least of the damage being done to American children, and by extension, our country’s future.
The greatest damage? The stranglehold of gender ideology on progressive education.
Promoted by organizations like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), in turn funded lavishly by corporations such as Pfizer, Target and Disney, LGBTQ themes and attitudes are blended into the curricula and taught at every level in the schools that educate the vast majority of American children.
The classic and traditional sexual ethics that most parents are still teaching their children at home are dismissed as “heteronormative” and oppressive, in picture books, teaching plans, and anti-bullying curricula.
Instead, the “gender unicorn” model is widely taught: a system of sexual identity where every proclivity is an equal option and the intractable reality of the human body is nowhere. In this reading, every child’s gender is a mystery to be solved by the child (preferably with the assistance of an enthusiastic kindergarten teacher).
Even worse, dissension from LBTQ orthodoxy is absolutely not tolerated, and activists, the authors argue, “regard opposition to their agenda as morally equivalent to opposition to racial equality.”
As a result, parents are routinely excluded from the most intimate areas of their kids’ lives — their sexuality and identity. Tragic examples of this countrywide reality abound in the book. In fact, parents, “especially religious parents, are treated as potential threats to the child’s safety, particularly on gender issues.”
In some schools, the authors point out, children can receive “support,” including hormonal dosing, without their parent’s knowledge, let alone consent.
In addition to imposing the fashionable tyranny of gender ideology, the authors make a case for how public schools routinely work to undermine the religious faith of their students.
Instead of being neutral on matters of religion, the schools enforce secularism at the cultural and personal levels and young people increasingly graduate as practical atheists.
In history curricula, America is portrayed as a dark force with a shameful past, and history is reduced to Marxist struggles and victim narratives, erasing healthy patriotism and fraying our tattered social fabric even further.
What the schools are producing are young adults molded in the progressive vision of the person: irreligious, androgynous, and self-defining.
Their well-taught view of America as a profoundly blemished country leads them not to civic engagement but to an angry and restless activism. These young adults arrive at college campuses primed for further convincing from similar-minded professors and administrations.
The authors make sympathetic claims for the students and parents caught in this public school vortex: like the developing girls whose feelings and modesty are violated in the women’s bathroom in favor of the “rights” of boys who have declared their intention to live as the opposite sex; or the girls whose sports and scholarship opportunities vanish like the back of the testosterone-rich boy runner sprinting ahead of the girls at the “women’s” track meet.
The angst of parents denied their natural right to help their children through difficult adolescences in ways that violate progressive orthodoxy are movingly portrayed as well.
By the end of the book, the authors have laid out a convincing case that our taxpayer-funded schools have been poisoned from the top down, and that attitudes are so entrenched that they cannot be reversed in time to help the current generation of schoolchildren. But their suggestion to “get them out now,” is in reality only an option for a minority of American families.
The current cultural devastation of the family, created in no small part by the decades-long progressive attacks on traditional norms in lower and upper education, ensures that more and more families rely on public schools for “comprehensive” services, including meals, social formation, and medical care.
The sad fact is that private schooling and homeschooling can only save a small fraction of America’s future. Meanwhile, our country is in for a rough ride.
Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, coming to the U.S. at the age of 11. She has written for USA Today, National Review, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, and has appeared on CNN, Telemundo, Fox News, and EWTN. She practices radiology in Miami, Florida, where she lives with her husband and five children.
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