Stephanie Lundquist-Arora | April 24, 2024
(Washington Examiner) — On April 11, a public school in DeWitt, Michigan, sent a letter home with its first grade students notifying parents about a plan to teach the 6-year-old children about gender ideology. Not only is this topic a reprehensible overreach of government-funded schools, but it is extremely age-inappropriate. In first grade, children do not even have the language foundation to understand what a pronoun is.
Like many people across the country, parents in that district have awoken to the public school teachers’ and administrators’ efforts to politically indoctrinate their children from an early age. Fortunately, parents were paying attention and there was an outcry in the district that forced the school to cancel the ridiculous lesson.
The DeWitt incident and the many others like it in public schools across the nation are symptomatic of the decline in educational standards in America. No longer do public schools focus on foundational concepts that will help students achieve basic literacy and mathematical proficiency. Instead, they cultishly “teach” sociopolitical viewpoints from the very beginning of the children’s public school education.
Leftist activists in public schools try to teach these gender identity concepts to our children as though they are socially accepted facts. In reality, in case it needs to be clarified, men cannot have babies, and the pronoun they/them for a single person is grammatically incorrect. Also, the large majority of people don’t believe any of this ideology and agree that gender is determined by sex at birth. The vast majority of parents are not on board with the government telling our children otherwise.
There are many basic things our taxpayer-funded schools should be — but are not — teaching students instead, such as how to read. In Kentucky, for example, where Democratic leaders including Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) have tried to kill school choice measures, just 47% of Kentucky’s elementary school children are proficient in reading, in comparison to 45% proficiency the year prior. Fifty-three percent of Kentucky’s children cannot read at grade level. Yet Beshear has held up these statistics as supposed proof that Kentucky’s public schools are succeeding.