Mark Latham: Safe Schools the toxic weed we can’t stamp out of the schoolyard
TEN year olds are being subjected to a radical Safe Schools-style gender agenda in NSW’s classrooms — despite repeated attempts to ditch the flawed system — writes Mark Latham.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Mark Latham: Same-Sex yes vote will open a can of worms
Mark Latham: Gender politics burning down the house
Like a toxic weed that nobody can rid from their garden, the Safe Schools program keeps growing back into NSW classrooms.
When it was established in 2013, it was supposed to be about the prevention of playground bullying.
But its founder, the Victorian academic Roz Ward, admitted its true purpose was to foster gender and sexual diversity as part of a program of Marxist liberation.
In April this year, the NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes announced that Safe Schools was to be abolished and replaced by “an updated anti-bullying strategy”.
Four months later, the Daily Telegraph exposed the way in which education bureaucrats “had snuck the controversial course back into the NSW curriculum through sex education classes for Years 1-10”.
It was the program that refused to die.
Again, Minister Stokes vowed to kill it off, plus sideline the Safe Schools resurrection squad within his department.
The result of this power struggle has become clear.
MIRANDA DEVINE: An epidemic of transgender children is Safe Schools’ legacy
Public servants are running our schools, not the hapless Liberal Party Minister.
Last week, teachers in South-West Sydney told me about the revival of Safe Schools under a new guise: the Child Protection syllabus taught in Personal Development, Health and Physical Education (PDHPE) courses.
The original Trojan Horse in ancient Troy had one carefully constructed facade.
Safe Schools has had three: anti-bullying, sex education and now child protection.
I was directed to a NSW Department of Education website to discover a lesson in Gender Fluidity 101.
Students in Years 5 and 6 — so as young as 10 years of age — are being taught that, “Femininity and masculinity are not necessarily inherent categories that pre-exist in each individual.”
Children are encouraged to act “as agents in the construction and maintenance of gender categories”, moving beyond “gender as binarisms” (that is, a choice between being male and female).
As a result, “the dominant social order” may be “resisted” — an echo of Ward’s radical political message.
Students are then required to complete a classroom exercise, where they bring in “a collection of birthday cards they and their siblings have received over the years.”
Even though teachers are required to display the male and female cards on separate boards, they must “avoid using labels such as ‘boys’ cards’ or ‘girls’ pictures’.”
This is another crazy “de-gendering” of language.
The exercise also seeks to undermine family life.
Students are encouraged to challenge the cards’ depiction of “how you live your life as a girl or a boy”.
Then they are asked to “better describe the way you really are” — a rebuff to loving parents and the type of birthday cards they have given their children.
This too is part of the Safe Schools agenda: attacking the nuclear family for its role in providing social stability and the “smooth … operation of capitalism”.
Mark Latham: Education fads are failing our children
The PDHPE syllabus ends with an invocation for “children to be free to choose their own ways of being a boy or a girl”, noting how “desirable ways of enacting gender” are often “contradictory or fluid”.
What’s this got to do with child protection?
It’s straight-out Leftist propaganda, masquerading as physical education.
Minister Stokes has lost control of his department.
Gender fluidity has been written into a range of NSW courses, consistent with Safe School’s neo-Marxist objectives.
When 10-year-olds are being taught this tosh, no parent can have confidence in government schools.
Their only option is to find a good religious school that believes in the principles of biological science — that is to say, that people are born either male or female.
And I say this as an atheist.
As long as my backside points to the ground, I will do everything I can to ensure my children aren’t exposed to these sorts of subversive beliefs.
The encouragement of gender and sexual diversity in education is a cancer on commonsense.
These are matters for parents to sort out, if they ever arise, not the relative strangers in our lives who work in the schools system.
Last month I had contact with two other teachers.
One said, “All this gender theory is fostering a 21st Century version of teenage rebellion, urging kids to buck the system for spurious reasons.”
“At a practical level, what happens to a girl who identifies as a male in the morning but gets her period later in the day?”
Good question.
The Leftist project is to defeat nature and mould society in its own image.
But some things are immutable, like the basics of biology.
Another teacher, from a high school in southern NSW, described how some students are exploiting the new identity agenda.
“We have one pupil who changes gender like clockwork”, she said.
“If he is wearing a hat at school, it’s to show that he’s a boy that day.”
“When the hat is off, she’s a girl — that’s how bizarre it has become”.
The teacher regards the situation as “a clear gaming of the system” but feels powerless under departmental guidelines.
“With so much hype about mental health, no one can say a word to the student for fear of self-harm and a certain end to that teacher’s career”, she said.
Effectively, the Mad Hatter has more power than the teachers and principal.
Schools made a big mistake when they stopped being places of learning and ventured into the world of mental health assessment and radical gender theory.
The toxic weed has overrun the garden.