Rita Panahi: Last thing Australian boys need is to be taught they’re toxic

While kids should definitely be informed what constitutes consent, they should not be brainwashed in the divisive politics of an activist class.

The last thing the school curriculum needs is more social engineering. Teaching impressionable kids about so-called “toxic masculinity” will only end in what we saw in a Warrnambool school with boys being forced to apologise for being born boys.

Brauer College made international headlines a fortnight ago after boys as young as 12 were told to “stand up and apologise” to female classmates during an assembly. Understandably not only were parents appalled but some of the young boys were left bewildered wondering why they were apologising for something they had zero control over; being born male. After all there was no suggestion that any of the boys forced to apologise for their gender were guilty of sexually assaulting or harassing female students.

“He’s upset by it – he now has this misconception that everybody looks at him and males as predators or somebody wishing to do harm to someone in a sexualised manner – he’s 12,” Danielle Shepherd, a mother of a boy at Brauer College said. Other parents reported their boys did not want to go to school with one telling his mum: “I am not a rapist, why did I have to apologise”.

Collective guilt is never a good idea nor is the simplistic notion that every boy is privileged and a potential predator and every girl a perpetual victim but that is what is being pushed at Victorian schools and there’s more to come.

The last thing the school curriculum needs is more social engineering

Education Minister James Merlino is working with a sexual assault campaigner who wants to further entrench concepts such as ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘slut shaming’ into the school curriculum. Chanel Contos is helping the state government develop updated consent classes. “I’ve been working with them (state government) on creating the content … I feel like people don’t know that oral sex is sexual assault and that your boyfriend, friend or someone you know personally can rape you – this needs to be taught,” she said. “We need to talk about slut shaming and the fact that girls’ sexual pleasure is so taboo.”

Victorian school kids are already subjected to radical gender theory under the so-called “Safe Schools” program co-founded by a Marxist academic and activist, a program that most other states have wisely abandoned. The program’s toxic excesses became so radioactive that the NSW opposition leader back in 2017 vowed that ‘Safe Schools’ agenda will “never return” under a Labor government but in Victoria it remains popular with the Dan Andrews government.

Then there’s the Respectful Relationships program, another piece of social engineering based on flawed gender theory and junk research. You have to hand it to the activist Left, they are clever in giving their radical agendas names that nobody could possibly disagree with but a closer look at Safe Schools and Respectful Relationships will have alarm bells ringing.

I’m all for kids being taught about consent in school but it should be done from a fact-based legal framework. Kids should be taught what constitutes consent, that people who are inebriated cannot consent nor those below a certain age but they should not be brainwashed in the divisive politics of the activist class.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if there was as much focus on academic excellence as there is on indoctrination in Victorian schools, perhaps then our students wouldn’t trail those in Kazakhstan. And, isn’t it curious that there is never any effort to address the fact that boys trail girls academically from primary school to university?

Women have outnumbered men at Australian universities since the 1980s and girls consistently outperform boys in primary and secondary school. As far as I’m concerned that is something that should be celebrated but you can be sure if the reverse were true there’d be dozens of campaigns to address the issue and the patriarchy, institutional sexism and misogyny would be blamed for the gender education gap.

Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist

@RitaPanahi