Miranda Devine: Safe Schools is not dead. It secretly lives on via accredited teacher courses
Don’t be fooled by the latest announcement to overhaul the school curriculum. It won’t stop the nonsense ideologies being imposed on impressionable minds under the guise of social justice, writes Miranda Devine.
Rendezview
Don't miss out on the headlines from Rendezview. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The plummeting academic performance of Australian students, despite the $60 billion taxpayers spend each year on schools, is a crying shame.
It can easily be explained by the teaching profession’s obsessive preoccupation with social engineering in place of direct instruction of reading, maths and science.
You know our competitors in the rest of Asia aren’t making the same mistake, and they’re spending far less per capita.
So now the NSW government has announced the biggest shake-up of the state’s curriculum in 30 years, pledging to replace useless subjects such as lifestyle studies and puppetry with more rigorous disciplines.
Let’s hope it makes a difference but, until there is a radical rethink of teacher education, I won’t hold my breath.
The agents of destruction in the education establishment, who have presided over the decline in standards over the past two decades, will continue their perverse project, unchallenged and out of sight.
Their aim always has been to mould young minds, without the permission of parents, in order to create the utopian Marxist society of their imaginations.
Thus, three years after the NSW government finally found the courage to abolish the Orwellian “Safe Schools” sexualisation and gender fluidity child brainwashing program, we find it has crept in again through the “back door”, as MP Mark Latham puts it.
Safe Schools actually has become “more dangerous”, says the NSW One Nation leader, as it has been integrated into the 100 hours of professional development programs which teachers must complete in NSW every seven years to maintain their accreditation.
One such professional development program, accredited through the NSW Education Standards Authority, is called “MultiVerse”, and includes modules on ‘Queer Thinking in Early Childhood’ for children as young as three.
MultiVerse is run by an early childhood education consultant who calls herself “Red Ruby Scarlet”, aka Dr Miriam Giugni, who believes “teaching is an important form of activism”, and once tried to rename Father’s Day as ‘Special Person’s Day’.
Her honours thesis from the University of Western Sydney was titled “Secret Children’s Business: The Black Market of Identity.”
Also “secret” is the Facebook group through which Scarlet teaches her content.
“Once you have registered for this course you will be added to a secret Facebook Group,” her MultiVerse website declares.
“The Facebook group is secret so that participants have a safe space to learn, discuss and share”.
What are they hiding?
For children as young as three, MultiVerse offers teaching modules including ‘Queer Pedagogies’, ‘Intersex Identities’, ‘Living Non-Binary’, “Raising Non-Binary” and ‘Aboriginal Queerness and Queeness’.
Another online course is “‘My Friend Has Two Mums’ … exploring gender and sexuality in early childhood”.
Why preschool teachers think they need to involve themselves in sexualising small children is one of the eternal mysteries of our age.
No parent I know wants a teacher “exploring” their child’s “gender and sexuality”.
As the Prime Minister once said, “Let kids be kids”.
But the Safe Schools ideology is like a vampire still waiting for a stake in the heart. At every stage it is aided and abetted by state and federal education bureaucracies and spineless politicians.
Scarlet runs her NESA-accredited teacher training courses, through the Australian Education and Care Workforce professional body.
“These political indoctrination camps for four-year-olds have been run under the nose of a Coalition Government,” says Latham, who is planning a private members’ bill to demand NESA deregister MultiVerse and conduct a full audit of gender fluidity professional development and teaching.
He wants all such content and training removed from the NSW education system.
“That’s the problem, the Ministers don’t actually run the system and refuse to purge the post-modernists”.
He points out that the only public transparency about MultiVerse course content comes from testimonials on the website.
Tash Cook, the Director of the Cooks Hill Preschool in Newcastle, for instance, says the course helped her look “through a queer lens to build our inclusive practice”.
Kindergarten teacher, Sylvana Li, says Scarlet showed her how to “put my queer lens on, especially in children’s play”.
The Director of the Evans Head Preschool, Allyson Cuskelly, says: “There has been a lot of reflection around celebrations such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and the way we cater for diverse family groupings”.
Great. Maybe we’ll see ‘Special Persons Day’ in Evans Head on September 6.
Latham also has analysed Scarlet’s 2016 book ‘The Anti-Bias Approach in Early Childhood’, which he describes as “150 pages of gender fluidity propaganda … straight from the Safe Schools playbook”.
The book claims we are not born male and female but are indoctrinated by society into acquiring a particular gender. The aim is for children to choose their own gender.
It features a 6-year-old girl, if such a word is allowed, named “Liv”, who has been perfectly indoctrinated to parrot the Safe Schools mantra: “I think that a man and a man, and a girl and a girl, and a genderqueer and a genderqueer can all marry each other both together.”
Latham is not impressed: “It is pure social engineering, with very young children taught things that should be left to discussion with their parents later in life”.
Scarlet probably means well but she is well outside her lane.
We all want our children to be kind and inclusive, but teachers have no right to intrude on the private realm and impose nonsense ideologies on impressionable minds under the guise of social justice.
Where is the Liberal party on this issue? As usual, they have rolled over to the teacher unions and activists in education departments, who do not have the best interest of our children at heart.
After inquiries from the Daily Telegraph yesterday, NESA launched an investigation into MultiVerse, saying it had been accredited last January for three sample courses, “Playing with Clay”, “Drawing & Story Telling” and “Painting”, none of which have anything to do with “Queer Thinking in Early Childhood”.
But you have to ask how parents can trust the body set up to ensure teaching standards when it’s bureaucrats seem to have no clue what’s happening under their noses.