Does God care whether we people marry and have children?
Does God care whether Christian parents raise their children to know him?
Should government promote bearing children?
What are some effects of declining birth rates in other countries?
What are the economic effects of declining birth rates?
Who has the right to decide how children are trained: government or parents?
What does the Bible say about parents having to raise children to know him?
Does the government have the responsibility for training children?
What do educational bureaucrats think of parents training children?
What do school boards think of parents training children?
Should school boards be elected by local, state or federal government?
Should Christians be opposed to government-run education? (public schools)
How should schools be viewed by parents? As a replacement or as a helper?
How are schools viewed by those on the left and in communist countries?
How can you measure how supporting a government is of parental rights?
How is parental authority viewed in left-wing EU countries like Germany?
How is parental authority respected in the United States?
Should parents have a choice of where their children go to school?
What is a voucher program? How is it related to parental autonomy?
How does competition (school choice) in education serve parental needs?
Why do public school teachers, unions and educrats oppose competitition?
How well do public schools do in educating children to achieve?
Does the government-run monopoly of public schools produce results?
Does paying more and more money to public schools make them perform?
How do teacher unions feel about having to compete in a voucher system?
Does the public school monopoly penalize the poorest students?
Does the public school monopoly penalize children of certain races?
Does the public school monopoly cause racial prejudice?
What else should parents demand on education policy?
Is it good for parents when schools refuse to fire underperforming teachers?
This podcast is just amazing! This is what we need to be teaching in church. Church should be the place where you go to learn and reflect about how to tailor your life plan based on what the Bible says. And I think that this whole notion of free market – of choice and competition benefiting the consumer (parents) – applies to everything that government does, especially education and health care. The genius of America is that our Founding Fathers engineered a system that reflected all of this knowledge of economics, which then made it much easier for individuals and families to enjoy liberty and a higher quality of life. If we want to keep the benefits, we have to remember why these decisions were made at the founding of our nation.
Where do young people get their positive view of LGBT issues?
Last week I blogged about a case from Canada where the teachers and administrators conspired with doctors to get a child onto the transgender track. Here is another case that was just reported on the weekend, this time from the UK. What was shocking to me was that this school is apparently a “free school” – the UK term for a private school.
A school has been accused of secretly allowing a 13-year-old girl to attend ‘radicalising’ mentoring sessions that convinced her that she was transgender.
Ashleigh and Ged Barnett allege that until the one-to-one sessions began last September, their daughter appeared comfortable in her body and showed little interest in transgender issues.
But they say she had changed completely by November, sporting a short haircut and talking about feeling that she was really a boy.
They were confused by the transformation until they met her headteacher to discuss another matter and learned that their daughter had been having weekly sessions with the head of the school’s LGBT group.
[…]‘The teaching assistant also pointed her in the direction of a YouTube website of a trans activist, which featured a video where they showed off their mastectomy scars and told how well the operation had gone.’
The couple said they were furious when they found school staff had let the teenager attend the sessions ‘behind our backs’.
Mrs Barnett said: ‘The school didn’t think it was fit to tell us. We are her parents, but responsibility to care for our child has been taken away. The attitude is that it’s the child’s choice and it’s got nothing to do with us.
The teachers are very clear that although they are being paid to do a job by parents, they are not going to their job. They deserve to be paid by parents to do whatever they want. Not what parents want. In fact, the schools are in league with organizations on the radicl left, and the teachers and administrators are much more interested in getting the approval of these far-left groups than the parents who pay their salaries.
Mrs Barnett also claimed that the teaching assistant encouraged their daughter to change in a boy’s cubicle and that staff began using a male name for her.
She alleges the teaching assistant had no formal counselling qualifications and only received training from local charity Eikon that provides ‘LGBT+ awareness sessions’ for schools.
In recent email correspondence with the couple, headteacher Jane Davies said she believed their daughter should be left to use the changing facilities she preferred.
‘We will continue to provide a safe environment for [your child], but it is not our place to alert you to how she feels,’ she wrote.
‘It is important that you understand that she is old enough to make her own decisions.’
This is not an unusual attitude for teachers to take about handling the children who are entrusted to them. There was a time in the past when teachers were more humble, and saw themselves as partners with parents. But that went out of fashion way back during the time of progressive President Woodrow Wilson.
He said this:
The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible. By the time a man has grown old enough to have a son in college he has specialized. The university should generalize the treatment of its undergraduates, should struggle to put them in touch with every force of life.
Instead of seeing their purpose a serving parents, they see themselves as masters of the child, and the parents just pay their salaries and feed and clothe the child. The worldview transfer is done by the teachers, because they are the keepers of all wisdom and morality.
Well, as always in these matters, it’s good to look at the studies. So let’s look at a recent one that should help parents to understand transgenderism.
Here’s how the study was first reported by Science Daily:
This month, a Brown University researcher published the first study to empirically describe teens and young adults who did not have symptoms of gender dysphoria during childhood but who were observed by their parents to rapidly develop gender dysphoria symptoms over days, weeks or months during or after puberty.
[…]The study was published on Aug. 16 in PLOS ONE.
Peer pressure / The Internet:
The pattern of clusters of teens in friend groups becoming transgender-identified, the group dynamics of these friend groups and the types of advice viewed online led her to the hypothesis that friends and online sources could spread certain beliefs.
[….]”Of the parents who provided information about their child’s friendship group, about a third responded that more than half of the kids in the friendship group became transgender-identified,” Littman said. “A group with 50 percent of its members becoming transgender-identified represents a rate that is more 70 times the expected prevalence for young adults.”
This article at The Federalist had a few examples to illustrate the conclusion of the study. I’ll pick two.
The study includes other eye-opening information, such as case studies of several children’s stories.
“A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends were taking group lessons together with a very popular coach. The coach came out as transgender, and, within one year, all four students announced they were also transgender.”
“A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends are part of a larger friend group that spends much of their time talking about gender and sexuality. The three natal female friends all announced they were trans boys and chose similar masculine names. After spending time with these three friends, the 14-year-old natal female announced that she was also a trans boy.”
I thought this quote from that article was interesting as well, given the culture’s obsession with “bullying”, which is a nebulous term that can mean actual bullying, or mere disagreement.
The study also may indicate that school “anti-bullying” programs typically created by LGBT activist organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign may help accelerate children identifying as transgender by pushing peers and authority figures to profusely express their support.
Coming out as transgender means instant fame and popularity, because you’re a victim, and everyone has to be nice to you… or else:
“Great increase in popularity among the student body at large. Being trans is a gold star in the eyes of other teens,” wrote one parent on the study response form. Another wrote, “not so much ‘popularity’ increasing as ‘status’ … also she became untouchable in terms of bullying in school as teachers who ignored homophobic bullying …are now all at pains to be hot on the heels of any trans bullying.”
People on the left are always faking hate crimes against themselves or making false rape accusations. Being a victim gets them attention and makes people treat them nicely.
The response from LGBT activists to this study was to claim that it was full of errors, so it was pulled and submitted to rigorous review. You won’t be surprised to find that the second review process found no major errors in the paper.
Elizabeth Warren says she was a victim of discrimination
Everyone knows that Elizabeth Warren claims Native American ancestry, and that she publicized a blood test showing that she has very little Native American ancestry. But that’s not the only time she’s made claims like this. In the past, she claimed that when she was pregnant and working as a teacher, that her male boss hired a replacement for her. Is she telling the truth? Let’s see.
The Daily Caller explains what she’s been saying:
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly claimed on the presidential campaign trail that she was pushed out of her job as a special needs teacher after one year because she was “visibly pregnant” — but she told a different story in 2007.
The Democratic senator today portrays herself as a victim of discrimination; however, in 2007 she linked her departure to lacking proper credentials for a permanent teaching position.
Warren said during a September presidential debate that she “made it as a special needs teacher. … But at the end of that first year, I was visibly pregnant. And back in the day, that meant that the principal said to me — wished me luck and hired someone else for the job.”
She similarly said at a campaign rally in May that she would “probably” still be teaching today, “but back in the day, before unions, the principal, by the time we got to the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant. And the principal did what principals did in those days: They wished you luck, showed you the door and hired someone else for the job.”
Well, did things really happen like she says they did?
Surprisingly, this one is pretty easy to decide, because there are records of hiring and firing for the county where she worked.
The Riverdale Board of Education approved a second-year teaching contractfor a young Elizabeth Warren, documents show, contradicting the Democratic presidential candidate’s repeated claims that she was asked not to return to teaching after a single year because she was “visibly pregnant.”
Minutes of an April 21, 1971, Riverdale Board of Education meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show that the board voted unanimously on a motion to extend Warren a “2nd year” contract for a two-days-per-week teaching job. That job is similar to the one she held the previous year, her first year of teaching. Minutes from a board meeting held two months later, on June 16, 1971, indicate that Warren’s resignation was “accepted with regret.”
[…]Warren’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the board of education records.
Just to re-cap the last time she claimed to be a victim, let’s go back to the Daily Caller article from above:
Warren has already faced scrutiny for laying claim to Native American heritage for years. For example, Warren listed herself as “American Indian” while applying for a legal license in 1986.
A genetic test showed that Warren possesses a minuscule fraction of Native American DNA. Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is actually more Native American than Warren is.
And she doesn’t like people asking about it. She gets very angry when people ask her for evidence, and insists that people should just believe her because she claims it. Like Rachel Dolezal, that white woman who claimed to be black. For some reason, the same people who thought that a white woman claiming to be black was morally wrong are perfectly find with a white woman claiming to be a Native American. She’s going to be the Democrat nominee!
It’s very popular on the secular left these days to try to convince people to support leftist policies by lying about being a victim. And this will work on a large segment of the population that only listens to progressive news media, and doesn’t check the facts for themselves. We should probably make a plan to have an influence on our neighbors before the election by sharing the truth about her claims of victimhood.
WINTERY KNIGHT 