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News

Ontario Liberals abandon plan to sexualize children in schools

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McGuinty wants children prepared for anal sex in school

First some background from LifeSiteNews.

Excerpt:

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced Wednesday that the Ontario government will be requiring Catholic schools to teach the new provincial, explicit sex ed curriculum that been slammed not only by Catholic leaders but the Progressive Conservative party and secular columnists.

“They’re part of the publicly funded school system here in Ontario and this is part of our curriculum,” said McGuinty, who says he is himself Catholic.  “If parents are uncomfortable with certain aspects of this new curriculum, they can and they are free to withdraw their children from the classroom.”

[…]The curriculum is designed to align with the Ministry’s equity and inclusive education strategy, which is seeking, among other things, to promote homosexualism and transgenderism in Ontario’s schools.

Sex ed is now set to begin as early as grade 1, where students will learn about their body parts, including genitalia.  In grade 3, they begin exploring “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”  In grade 6, students are taught that masturbation is “common” and “not harmful,” and by grade 7 they are to learn about oral and anal intercourse and how to use condoms.

Leona Dombrowsky, Ontario’s new Minister of Education, also insisted Wednesday that Catholic schools must teach the new program.  “This is the Ontario curriculum, and it’s the curriculum for all schools and all students,” said the former Catholic school board trustee.

So Catholic-educated politicians were behind this initiative.

I think that Christians need to do a better job of integrating rigorous Bible reading, theology and ESPECIALLY apologetics into our church life. There should be debates and lectures by practicing scientists, economists, social scientists, philosophers and historians. If we insist on 5-minute homilies and praise hymns, then our own children will grow up to be tools of the secular left. Church should be about truth, not feelings.

You can see how different groups of Christians vote in this graph. I think we have a serious problem in the church where Christians who are solid on socially conservative issues think that corporations are bad, taxes are good and that we need to have government control carbon emissions and health care. Fiscal liberalism means sexualization of children in the schools. Lots of naive Christians vote to “help” the poor via big government.

Thankfully, in Ontario there was a happy ending – for now.

From the National Post. (H/T 1RedThread)

Excerpt:

Just days after defending a new sex education program that would include mention of homosexuality in Grade 3 and anal intercourse in Grade 7, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has backed down in the face of a public backlash.

[…]He insisted the new curriculum applied to “all students in publicly funded schools, including Catholic schools.”

His education minister, Leona Dombrowsky, also said the Catholic Church supported the new curriculum.

But Catholic officials made it clear they were not prepared to implement any of the more controversial elements, including talk of homosexuality and masturbation in Grades 3 and 6 respectively.

[…]Mr. McGuinty was squarely behind the new curriculum when he was first asked about it Tuesday morning.

“They are going to get this information,” he said moments after a Christian family values group alerted the media to the changes. “If we can provide [it] in a format and in a venue over which we have some control or they can just get it entirely on their own and be informed by potentially uninformed sources, like their friends at school.

No mention of parents, who are too buy wasting their money on “beer and popcorn”, as Liberals have said in the past. No, it’s the government’s job to prepare children for sex early on so that feminists and gay rights activists can be appeased that the next generation will think that sex outside of marriage is normal. Because schools are about undermining the naive, outdated values of religious taxpaying parents.

News

Liberal government in Ontario to introduce more explicit sex education in schools

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Story from the left-wing Globe and Mail.

Excerpt:

The days of euphemisms and innuendo in Ontario’s classrooms are numbered, with the province set to roll out a new sex education curriculum next fall built on clear and explicit language that has raised objections from conservative parent groups.

The revision, outlined in 208 pages that were quietly posted on the Ministry of Education’s website in January, will for the first time teach Grade 3 pupils about such topics as sexual identity and orientation, and introduce terms like “anal intercourse” and “vaginal lubrication” to children in Grades 6 and 7. The new curriculum begins in Grade 1 with lessons about the proper names of body parts.

And the response from Liberal party Premier (governor) Dalton McGuinty?

The Premier stood by the curriculum, saying he has confidence in the judgment of school principals and teachers to present the information in a thoughtful and responsible manner. If sex education is not taught in the classroom, he added, students could get information from potentially uninformed sources, such as their friends.

“If we can provide it in a format and in a venue over which we have some control … why wouldn’t we recognize that we live in an information age and why wouldn’t we try to present this information in a thoughtful and responsible and open way,” Mr. McGuinty said.

Yes, if the teachers don’t teach the kids about sex, then the children could hear about it from their know-nothing religious fanatic parents. The horror!

More details:

Some of the most controversial changes are in the Grade 3 curriculum. In a discussion on human development and showing respect for people’s differences, for example, teachers are invited to discuss “invisible differences,” including gender identity and sexual orientation, in an effort to reflect the fact that more and more students have same-sex parents.

[…]In another key change, the topic of puberty will be introduced in Grade 4, a year earlier than in the old curriculum, in recognition of the fact that many children reach puberty at younger ages. The description of physical changes is also more explicit in the new version, including the development of breasts and body hair.

Ontario is the province that also boasts one of the worst Human Rights Commissions, as well as taxpayer-funded in vitro fertilization, abortions and sex changes. The new curriculum has no opt-out mechanism for concerned parents. Ontario parents will pay for the indoctrination of children and their vulnerable children will learn about sex using materials from the extreme left.

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Commentary

Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s fight against the Washington, D.C. teacher unions

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I’ve always believed that the best way to learn about a topic is by understanding the topic as a fight between two opposing teams. And that’s how we’re going to learn about the Washington D.C. school system in this balanced post at the libertarian magazine Reason.(Not the usual conservative stuff I post 100% of the time)

Here’s the situation:

D.C. is a divided town. In the heart of the capital, the federal government hums along, churning out paperwork and disillusioned interns at a steady clip. But the rest of the city is in pretty miserable shape. The District of Columbia Public Schools rank below all 50 states in national math and reading tests, squatting at the bottom of the list for years at a time. More than 40 percent of D.C. students drop out altogether. Only 9 percent of the District’s high schoolers will finish college within five years of graduation. And all this failure doesn’t come cheap: The city spends $14,699 per pupil, more than all but two states and about $5,000 more than the national average. Yet as unlikely as it seems, D.C. may prove to be the last best hope for school reform in the United States.

But then, a reform-minded superintendent named Michelle Rhee appeared:

In July 2008, Rhee revealed her opening gambit with the teachers union: She offered the teachers a whole lot of money. Under her proposal, educators would have two choices. With the first option, teachers would get a $10,000 bonus—a bribe, really—and a 20 percent raise. Nothing else would change. Benefits, rights, and privileges would remain as they were. Under the second option, teachers would receive a $10,000 bonus, a 45 percent increase in base salary, and the possibility of total earnings up to $131,000 a year through bonuses tied to student performance. In exchange, they would have to forfeit their tenure protections.

But the teachers said no to her offer:

Teachers simply don’t believe that it should be possible for them to be fired—not by a principal, not by a superintendent, not by anyone. Unions and other opponents of the reformers prefer to stick with warmed-over solutions that have been failing for decades: smaller class sizes, more teacher pay, and more job security.

Then Rhee tried to tie teacher license renewals to performance, but the unions said no:

In 2008, after Rhee’s office released a statement about tying teacher licensing to student outcomes, the Washington Teachers Union (the dominant local union) sent an email message to its members stating, “This proposed regulation would not benefit DCPS teachers, as a teacher’s true effectiveness should not be linked to a teacher’s right to renew his or her license.” The message went on to explain that it was “dangerous and discriminatory” to “require a candidate to demonstrate effectiveness to continue teaching in a District of Columbia Public School.”

Children benefit when parents can get a voucher so the parents can choose a better school, and especially when they can choose charter schools or even private schools or even homeschooling – anything is better than public schools. But the unions don’t want parents to be able to use a voucher to choose a competitor. Unions want children to remain in failing schools so that the union members will not loose their jobs.

The article continues:

In pre-Rhee D.C. the single glimmer of hope for many families was the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships Program. Funded by a separate congressional appropriation of $14 million, it offered vouchers to kids in failing schools, allowing them to attend private school instead of their assigned public school. The program took no money from the city budget and was hugely popular with parents and kids; since 2004 more than 7,200 students had applied for a limited number of slots. Last year 1,700 kids were accepted. Next year there will be none. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama had promised to let scientific results determine his education policy. In office, however, he let political influence kill the program even as initial studies were showing positive gains by students and high parental satisfaction. The National Education Association, which is consistently one of the biggest single donors to U.S. political campaigns, pressured the Democratic Congress to eliminate funding for vouchers in 2009. Obama promptly signed the death sentence into law.

The fight over vouchers and charter schools—both of which serve as workarounds to the ossified hiring/firing rules of public schools—is playing out all around the country, with teachers unions usually coming out on the winning side.

[…]Teachers unions contribute more than $60 million a year to political campaigns, topping contributor lists at the state and federal levels, and nearly all of the money goes to Democrats. That investment buys the continuation of the status quo plus some platitudes about class size and teacher pay from every prominent Democrat. Reformers have virtually no presence on Capitol Hill.

On the one side, there is the courageous, no-nonsense superintendent Michelle Rhee, parents and children. And on the other side, there is the Washington D.C. education bureaucracy, teacher unions and the Democrat party. The unions are winning. Do parents care to understand what is stopping their own children from succeeding?

The shocking thing in all of this is that Rhee is a Democrat, and hardly a conservative. She’s no hero of mine, but at least we share the same enemies on this issue.

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