Schools: New UN curriculum fails our children
Geography lessons replaced with classes on gender identity. Veganism over virtues. And everything climate, climate, climate. Welcome to your new UN-approved curriculum, writes Miranda Devine.
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The problem of woke brainwashing of school students, especially on climate alarmism and gender fluidity, has come to the fore during the pandemic as parents have become more aware of what their children are being taught.
The aim seems to be to create an army of Greta Thunbergs, and the UN is playing a surprising role.
This is why NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham is preparing a private member’s bill to push back on the stealth hijacking of our children’s education.
He has been bombarded with complaints from parents pushing back on attempts to teach children to hate their own country, be confused about their gender and live in terror of a looming climate calamity.
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Much of this propaganda is being delivered without the knowledge or permission of parents.
In fact, the deeply flawed NSW curriculum review by Professor Geoff Masters, released last month, states that the family unit is in such “decline” that the job of “inculcating values and developing character” increasingly falls to schools.
The effrontery of such a claim has gone unchecked, but it is also an alarming indication of the state’s willingness to insert itself between a family and its children.
And don’t think Catholic schools are immune, especially if they adopt the curriculum of the UN-linked International Baccalaureate (IB), which substitutes moral relativism and global secular ethics in place of Judeo-Christian morality.
Here are some examples from Latham’s mailbag, with identities protected.
One dad, Tony, complained his daughters were indoctrinated on feminism, climate and gender fluidity at a Catholic school south of Sydney, where the IB was being introduced.
One daughter spent her first semester of Year 8 English “learning about feminism with whole lessons on how to correctly name people with neutral gender terms such as ‘police person’.”
Other lessons included UN climate propaganda in a video promotion of the upcoming Angry Birds Movie 2, which involves the euphemistically named UN “Department of Global Communications” partnering with Sony Pictures Entertainment and the UN Foundation to promote the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goal 13: take urgent action against climate change and its impacts.”
The video features voice actors and cartoon characters issuing doom-laden pronouncements about imminent catastrophic climate change.
“Take part in the global movement to stop our world from being destroyed … The UN has a plan to help the Earth and they need all of our help before it’s too late …
“From the food you eat to the clothes you wear … how will you fight climate change?”
Suggestions include “meat-free meals”.
“If we die it’s kinda your fault,” says one of the angry cartoon birds.
Another lesson featured a video of a San Francisco dance company “fighting climate change with dance” and claimed “humans are navigating blindly through environmental damage”.
There also was a lesson on feminism in which the class was shown a marketing video by Procter & Gamble for tampons and sanitary pads. The “Like a Girl” ad is presented as a campaign to “empower” young women.
“I do believe our education system is being hijacked,” says Tony.
“We like to think that we sent our daughters to a private Catholic school as they hold high moral standards that tie in with the laws of our land. But then they keep putting in all this other stuff (into the curriculum) that gets totally away from what I would consider a normal education that we had the privilege of receiving in our youth”.
Another of his daughters was taught about “misgendering babies” in a geography class.
Students were shown a BBC video on YouTube in which a baby girl is dressed as a boy and a baby boy as a girl and adults offer them toys, cars and trains for the “boy” and dolls for the “girl”. The adults are then shamed for conforming to traditional gender stereotypes.
The class discussion afterwards, says Tony, was about how “people shouldn’t misgender people based on appearance and the teacher made anyone who spoke against it feel bad.
“I expect my kids to learn what the capital of Peru is and about the weather, topography and actual geographical things when in a geography lesson,” he says.
When it comes to climate propaganda, the UN has extended beyond the IB program and into the teacher training business with its Climate Change Teacher Training Academy eduCCate Global. So far five schools in Australia have become ‘UN Climate Change Learn accredited’, according to the academy’s website.
But, as Alex Standish, University College London geography education lecturer, wrote last year in Spiked, the course is pure climate propaganda.
“Teachers are being provided not with simple background knowledge about climate change, but with a political worldview. (It is) misanthropic doom-mongering”.
At another Catholic school in the Hunter, dad Chris complained that his 13-year-old son was shown a video in geography class in which refugees who had arrived illegally by boat did nothing but complain about the raw deal Australia had given them.
“They pushed us to do some Vegemite to make us a true Aussie,” complained one man in the ABC Education video. “It’s terrible.”
A girl with a broad Aussie accent said when her family first arrived and didn’t speak English, “we were treated like incredibly uneducated people”.
Chris said the students were given no “context as to why Australia has an offshore detention regime, (such as) to prevent further boat drownings and end the people smuggler trade.”
His son was “upset (at being told) that we ‘lock’ these people up on Christmas Island (and) that the conditions are worse than prisons in Australia.
“This is a prime example of … the left-wing agenda of teachers who are preaching, not teaching,” he said.
After the class, Chris gave his son a quick geography quiz on “capital cities of countries … Unfortunately, he could only answer about 10 per cent of my questions.”
This is the worst part of woke education. There’s no time left for real learning.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph