Friday, March 17, 2023

Indoctrination and self-serving prejudice. . .

The other day I watched a video of a kindergarten teacher reading a story to her class.  In the story, she asked the children if the character was a boy or a girl.  One young lad seemed spontaneously to offer the observation that the child might be non-binary.  Now this is kindergarten!!  No kindergarten child could possibly know that term or use it unless that child had been indoctrinated by someone and coached to see things in a framework no kindergarten child would or should ever use.  And there it was.   Turns out the teacher is, you guessed it, non-binary.  The teacher lauded the child for the astute answer and encouraged the children to just be children -- while they are working out what gender they might be.  Ah, all is well and good in paradise.

If this is not indoctrination, I do not know what is.  Furthermore, it is not indoctrination of fact and truth but of fiction and fancy.  No kindergarten child should be engaged on this level or encouraged to think about it.  Why can't we allow children to be children?  Why must we saddle them with the adult fiction of genders that are chosen and of bodies that have no say so it that choice?  If this is what education has become, parents should wake up to the new reality and make some hard choices in response to the drivel that is passing for educational theory and practice.  

Then, when I had thought I had heard the worst.  Another video showed the rant of a public school teacher who was offended that a student had misgendered her and that the counselors at the school had played down the offense.  In the end, you could hear the woman complaining that it was not only the student's duty to respect her gender and pronoun choice but such a violation of this right deserved a strong rebuke not only to the student but to the parents.  At that point, the teacher should have been fired on the spot.  Education does not exist to support a self-serving prejudice of feeling over fact and the presumption of this choice as the highest truth.

Although I live in Tennessee where schools are not on the cutting of such things as Critical Race Theory or the normalization of gender dysphoria, the reality is that every school in every state and city will soon have to make a choice between an easy accreditation and a hard fought losing fight to resist the gurus of wisdom who make such awards.  It will not be long before what is optional in the classroom becomes the obligatory and normative indoctrination of the gender alphabet problem on our children at their earliest ages.  Christians will have to decide if they can live with this kind of fake truth in the school or if they must adjust their lives and live with integrity to the higher truth of God's eternal word.

It is not if but when such a conversation as I cited above happens in the kindergarten or primary school near you.  We may not be able to do anything about the school system itself, although I suspect we can do more than we have attempted, but we can do something to make sure that what is moral ordinary there does not the ordinary morality of the truth that endures forever.  At one point in time we presumed that if we isolated the radicals to the halls of academia, the rest of the world (commerce, industry, government, and politics) would be kept safe -- insulated from the foolishness.  When academia ran out of jobs, the crazies entered the marketplace in search of a living.  The university was hopeless infected with such stuff (call it wokism) but we thought corporate America and cultural America could be kept safe.  We were wrong.  As soon as leaving a campus was necessary to pay the bills, corporate America and social and cultural America were infected with the pandemic of progressive liberalism.  Now even Amazon and Google sound like ivy league American exclusivism and wokism.  Government was sure to follow and politics rode this bandwagon from hell all that way to the sea and back.  As they have said, the cork is off the genie's bottle and everything that fan be crazy is.

We will have to find ways to preserve our children from this but, even moreso, to prepare them for what is out there and teach them how to respond.  Even in school districts that have a good reputation, the time is now to figure out what the backup plan is and how to figure out the timetable for what is good, right, and salutary.  The schools that produced the teachers and the accreditation people who certify their teaching have made the public school unsafe at any speed.  It may not be the beginning of the end but it is at least the end of the beginning and the fight is front and center for us all.

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