fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Propagandizing Second Graders

What little kids in one Brooklyn elementary school learn

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Valenti lives in Brooklyn. Let me ask the room: What is it like for second graders where you live? Are they getting the same propaganda? Do your kids go to public or private school?

UPDATE: Dear Hungarian and Czech Republic readers. Remember our conversations last month when I was over there, in which you all said that it’s inconceivable that this stuff would ever be accepted in your countries? If you had told most Americans a decade ago that this would be the lesson plan for seven and eight year old children, they would have accused you of being some kind of religious right lunatic. And yet, here we are. You have been warned.

UPDATE: A NYC reader comments:

I agree with Rod that this is propagandizing. Not so much because of the wording, but because (a) it takes a marginal phenomenon and elevates it to the level of a mainstream phenomenon (99% of people in the US are “cisgender”, and perhaps 95% “straight”, but those are stuck well down the list); because (b) far more importantly, because it encourages the belief that gender identification is a matter of labeling which one can simply decide to accept or reject; and most of all, because (c) it is doing so while addressing pre-pubertal children, who have not yet experienced the hormonal changes associated with their own development of sexuality, and so have no real context in which to understand it.

So yes, it is propaganda. Of course, a lot might depend on how it is contextualized within the classroom – but there I am not optimistic, to judge by the experience of my own second-grader (Manhattan private school). In my daughter’s class, the teachers (without informing the parents in advance), asked the children to identify THEMSELVES – to tell the class whether they felt like girls, boys, or “a bit of both”. The children were (as I understand) deeply embarrassed, and every one of them ended up deciding (without exception) that they were “a bit of both”.

What is more encouraging was that the parents, hearing of this, were generally outraged – and not just the closet conservative ones like myself, but all the liberal Manhattanites, who may have had no problem with LGBT issues in general, but certainly did NOT want their 7 and 8 year olds exposed to it like this. There were a lot of complaints, and I think the school will be less “woke” on this subject in future …

If I were you readers, I would ask my kids’ school principal what, exactly, is taught about gender ideology, LGBT, etc., in the classroom. Many high schools adopt policies in which teachers and administrators are forbidden from telling the parents of queer-identifying students of how their child presents at school. I would not be the least bit surprised if this mentality expressed itself in the lower grades by schools simply not informing parents that this is being taught to their kids.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now