Rotting from the Inside

You do not know them, probably. They are the faceless people. They answer the phone with their first name. You can't 'track them down'. They hide behind files. No, I am not talking of telemarketers or scammers, but of fine upstanding men and women in our government departments. Most are graduates, class of 2000.  Marx's finest. 

They are at all levels of the Education Empire that exists in each State and Federally. They do as they are told. And they are in the schools too. Heads, Principals. Teachers. All useful. Some, a few, scared.

Of course, Marx was an 'intellectual', not like that other Socialist. Ol' Karl prefers a different sort of storm trooper. 

Did it not occur to you that Roz Ward of La Trobe University didn't just 'strike lucky'?  Do you think that any old academic can just write a curriculum and get it all implemented in schools ? Did you think that a woman or a man with a PhD in Divinity could just forward a lesson plan in a fancy binder, along with ten carefully written books to get teachers to take kiddies through the finer points of altruism, and stand a chance?

It comes as a shock. Julie Cross spoke in the Oz Room

Gender lessons ‘bordering on pornographic’, says parent

A PUPIL at a northern beaches school was left “violated” after being asked to analyse sex scenarios of fictional middle-aged people as part of a personal development lesson.

The girls were asked to categorise a number of examples of sexual behaviours of middle-aged fictional characters, including “Joseph”, a middle-aged married man who fantasises only about men but talks negatively about homosexuals, although he is attracted to other males.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/manly-daily/gender-lessons-bordering-on-pornographic-says-parent/news-story/d342744c8d89ef198c5dd4794a2b9f6f?nk=1dc4d9f3f2a05effc85fce79fb2efc8a-1474706729

Another involves a promiscuous heterosexual woman, “Zarita”, who has multiple sexual partners during her 16-year marriage.

And “Philip” was a further example — he started having sex with adult men as an adolescent.

The material, a teaching resource from the NSW Education Department available to all state schools, was brought to the attention of a P & C committee member at Northern Beaches Secondary College, Mackellar Girls campus, who took it to principal Christine Del Gallo.

While Ms Del Gallo was reluctant to comment she said she had “reviewed” the material and had decided to “modify the case studies for future lessons”.

The Principal had not seen the materials? Are they expecting anyone to believe that? 

It is believed the examples were used in a personal development class and was heavily based on the Safe Schools program.

 Christine Del Gallo is the Principal of Northern Beaches Secondary College, Mackellar Girls Campus.  This is she >>>>>>

How did such a know-nothing persom get to be a Principal? 

The program has been criticised for encouraging teachers to “de-gender” their classroom language and promoting activities that encourage students to think about sexuality as not exclusively masculine or feminine.

P & C member Ali High, 44, said her friend’s Year 10 daughter surreptitiously took a photo of the document on her mobile phone because she felt “shocked” and “violated”.

Anyone else outside of a school feeling 'shocked and violated' would have been able to invoke Section 18c for such an offence, or one of half a dozen 'ombudsmen'. But not for this. It's official. Protected.

“Adult behaviours such as those described, should not be relevant to the lives of these underage girls,” Mrs High, a Manly mother of four, said.

“It borders on the pornographic.”

She said her daughter was in the younger years at the school, but she would not want her first idea of sex to come from these examples and her husband was concerned about how middle-aged men, like himself, were being portrayed.

Mrs High said she was also saddened they had used an example of a married woman as having “many” sexual partners.

She said she supported the idea behind the Safe Schools program, which advocates creating safe, non-bullying spaces, but said this material was not relevant.

Mrs High said she was pleased the principal had acted “quickly and decisively”, but she was concerned about the source of the material.

“I’ve sent a letter to the Department of Education with my concerns,” she said. “How is this happening? It is very sad.”

The Department of Education said the resource was supporting a PDHPE unit of work linked to the Teacher Toolbox and to the Stage 6 Crossroads program.

Boxes within boxes; files behind files. All 'approved' through goodness knows how many public servant's in and out trays. No-one raised a red flag? Of course not. Career. Salary. Do as you are told. Someone higher can always veto it.

Except they do not, of course.

“The Minister for Education has asked the Department to review the Teacher Toolbox and the gender diversity material in the Stage 6 Crossroads program,” a spokesman said.

Review, eh?  Well that should fix it. 

Meanwhile, NSW premier Mike Baird is considering a fundamental change to the Safe Schools program where parents would have to “opt in” to the program rather than the current situation where all students take part unless their parents choose to “opt out”.

How about scrapping it? How about firing twenty of thirty people starting at the top? 

Do you object to something your child is being taught? 

WELL Mums and Dads 

 STAND UP AND SCREAM OUT. 

'They' Are Attacking YOUR Children

And pay attention. Michael Cook has been on the case for a while and he is standing up and he is souting it out.

The new religion of transgenderism in Australian schools

Australia's Safe Schools program is so bizarre and fact-free that you can describe it as a cult, says an academic

Around the world, at least the English-speaking world, parents and politicians are under pressure to accept the scientific and moral validity of same-sex relationships and the transgender lifestyle. 

Fortunately, there has been a pushback from academics dismayed by the lack of academic rigour in many claims. Today we feature the main ideas of a report by University of Sydney law professor Patrick Parkinson. Tomorrow we will summarise the ideas of a landmark article by Kansas State University sociologist Walter Schumm. 

*****

One of the biggest setbacks for same-sex marriage in Australia has been the uproar around curriculum materials produced by the national Safe Schools Coalition (SSCA) for children in years 7 and 8.

These are supposed to stop bullying of homosexual and transgender students, but they also involve educating all students about sensitive topics, including sexual morality. 

Hundreds of schools, mostly government-run, have signed up. After noisy protests from parents, religious groups and politicians, the Federal Government stepped in and forced the SSCA to make significant changes.

However, the state of Victoria decided to forgo Federal funding and maintain the original program. Its Safe Schools group, based at La Trobe University, seceded from the national coalition and the state government plans to roll out its curriculum in all of its schools.

Perhaps because opponents are being painted as homophobes and knuckle-dragging right-wingers, there has been no comprehensive evaluation of the program (although MercatorNet did publish our own analysis last December.) The Federal Government commissioned a critique by a professor at the University of Western Australia, Bill Louden – but he had a mere two weeks to cobble his whitewash together.

Now, however, an Australian expert in family law, Patrick Parkinson, a professor at the University of Sydney, entered the fray. 

His review, posted on the internet over the weekend, is scathing.

Academically, he says, the Safe Schools program is so bad that it presents “a reputational problem for La Trobe University”. 

Medically, its guidelines are reckless. 

Legally, it offers misleading advice.

“There is certainly a place for an anti-bullying program that addresses the issues with which the Safe Schools program is concerned,” he writes, “but this program needs to be rescued from its progenitors.”

Professor Parkinson has several serious reservations.

Dodgy statistics. As MercatorNet pointed out last December, the Safe Schools program invents statistics about the prevalence of homosexuality and transgenderism. It claims that 10 percent of people are same-sex attracted, although only a few years before the La Trobe team reported that this figure was only 1 percent. The statistic, he says, “cannot be validated by any reliable research”.

The volatility of same-sex attraction. Parkinson says that the Safe Schools program is stuck in the psychology of the 1980s, when it was believed that a stable and fixed sexual orientation emerged in adolescence. But all the evidence suggests that most teenagers with same-sex attraction grow out of it. “It is not the case that someone who identifies as being same-sex attracted at 13-14 years of age has a fixed and stable orientation,” he points out. “Teenage same-sex attraction may or may not say anything about their adult sexuality.”

Insisting on a fixed identity could be dangerous. Most same-sex attracted children do not aspire to live as homosexuals. So insisting that they are doomed to live in the LGBTI lifestyle, never to have children of their own, could lead them to despair. Instead, they should be “assured that it is a very common, and normal, aspect of teenage psycho-sexual development which may or may not say anything about what they will grow up to be as adults.”

This may well be a message that is likely to prevent depression and suicidal ideation. 

Conversely, educational materials which are premised on the idea that sexual orientation emerges in early adolescence and remains fixed, so that it is sensible for young adolescents to identify as “gay” or “lesbian” as if this were a stable identity, should now be regarded as.. 

 unscientific and irresponsible.

Transgender statistics are wildly exaggerated. The curriculum claims that 4 percent of the population is transgender or “gender diverse”. But this figure is based largely on surveys of high school students. “A gender identity disorder cannot be diagnosed by survey,” Parkinson writes. “It is a medical diagnosis requiring careful medical assessment.” 

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5, the bible of the American Psychiatric Association, estimates that .. 

a maximum of 0.014 percent of the population have a gender identity disorder. 

This implies that the Safe Schools estimate is wrong by about 30,000 percent. 

“It is really not clear why it is thought that year 7 or 8 children need to learn anything about such rare conditions,” Parkinson comments acerbically.

Medical hazards. What if a student is thinking about transitioning to another gender? “Remarkably, nowhere in this document is there any reference to the need for any advice from a psychologist, doctor or psychiatrist, let alone anyone expert in the field,” he points out. “There is no requirement even to involve parents.” But international guidelines insist on the need for great caution and “careful and expert clinical management”. The Safe Schools program is throwing caution to the winds.

What’s behind the lack of common sense?

A number of critics have detected a Marxist plot to capture the hearts of school children. 

The manager and co-founder of Safe Schools Victoria, Roz Ward, is a La Trobe University academic and an unreconstructed Marxist (a species of intellectual which still flourishes in some Victorian universities). 

She told a conference last year, for instance, that “Marxism offers both the hope and the strategy needed to create a world where human sexuality, gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom in extraordinarily new and amazing ways that we can only try to imagine today,”

So the Red label is tempting, but Parkinson prefers to describe the ideology of the Safe Schools movement as a religion, a bit like Scientology, with its own language and rituals. 

The differentiation made between sex and gender, and the notion that gender is fluid and may be socially constructed, lie at the heart of the Safe Schools program … This is now quite a widespread belief system, especially in parts of the western world. This belief system is deeply held by some, and has many characteristics of being a religious belief …[It] is not the more rational because it is a belief that is sincerely held. Sincere people hold all sorts of strange beliefs.

Perhaps religious fervour explains the dodgy statistics. Convictions which are not based upon empirical observation do not need to be validated by facts. Parkinson continues:

Should such odd and unscientific beliefs, emanating from philosophy and gender studies departments rather than medical faculties, be taught as fact to primary and secondary school age children? There would be uproar if the beliefs of Scientologists that the personality or essence of oneself is distinct and separate from the physical body or the brain were being taught in state schools through state-funded programs. Yet the belief system that what gender you are is a matter for you to determine without reference to your physical and reproductive attributes may not be dissimilar in kind.

It will take more than one report to uproot an ideology which is defended so ardently by its supporters. But Patrick Parkinson’s attack on its academic credibility is a good beginning. A lot is at stake. Not only are young children being indoctrinated with ideas which would horrify their parents, but troubled young people may be shunted into a lifestyle which will make them bitter and unhappy adults.

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

I can understand the views of the professor in all but one point.  The analogy to a 'religion' draws a long bow. A religion may well be a 'belief system' but not all belief systems are religions. A religious person may have 'fervour' and may prozletise, but not all fervent people are religious and not all prozletisers are religious. 

A better descriptor of the Roz Ward type - and more accurate - would be 'Fanatic'. Indeed a host of technical and commonplace terms would also. Pervert, for example. Mentally deficient: morally bereft. 

Marxism is not a religion anymore than that other perversion of thought, Islam. And the fact that the people we elect and those we appoint to run our schools cannot see the danger of these obsessive, compulsive mental disorders is as much a worry as the content of the Safe Schools scheme.

From my place behind the bar, I would like to see all of those involved in pushing this filth and stupidity into and through the Departments of Education and implemented in our schools, named and shamed.

These faceless corrupters and destroyers of your children might be living in your street.

Drink deep.

Pax