This is absolutely disgusting when you can’t even say biological truth anymore you might as well just called the public schools fantasy schools because they’re just indoctrinating our children into believing these fantasies are realities when that is just not the case it is causing real damage to our youth and they are killing themselves after transitioning and realizing it was a big mistake
Derek Bryce
1 year ago
I have many friends and family members in the dull but (once) worthy country of Canada, sadly turning into a woke hellscape under the ministrations of the vapid Justin Trudeau. I’ve two recent tales to relate:
an old friend announced to me that her 9 year old daughter had recently ‘come out’. I suspect she announced this with such fanfare because I’m gay and she thought I’d instantly approve and ‘affirm’. In fact my immediate reaction was one of unease: ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but how does she know? She’s only 9’, I said. My friend acknowledged that she didn’t know but that her daughter’s school guidance counsellor was sure it was the case. I resisted the urge to use the term ‘groomer’ in relation to the counsellor and the conversation moved on.
another friend, an academic, informed me (with disapproval) that his university made staff attend a ‘training’ session in which they were told to become aware and supportive of … wait for it … ‘translanguaging’ and ‘multiple Englishes’ in students’ work.
Yeah, I think some of that lesbian stuff is just kids following this mindset (at least I think that’s true of two of my daughters who insisted they were gay at age 8-9 and now as teens date boys):
Reminds me of my social sciences tutor whose first degree was Englis with his tutor being CS Lewis. Any verbiage in essays would receive the margin comment of “This is nice. what does it mean”. Precision, even pedantry is so important.
Your friends are indeed complicit in their child’s grooming. You should tell them she probably won’t thank them for allowing it to happen when she grows up.
Please do explain to your Canadian friends that 9 is far too young to decide about one’s sexual orientation. She can make a decision after puberty. This is all a toxic fashion which will cause much suffering to many youngsters (while some people/ companies are making big bucks out of this fashion).
I’ve lived in “dull” Canada for all but three of my 67 years. The only dull and/or boring thing about it is hearing outsiders talk about how dull it is. As for the so-called “hellscape”, I now live in Vancouver, BC, which is the beating heart and soul of leftism/identity politics etc., in this country, and as hellscapes go, it’s still pretty nice here. Yes, this is the place where “we acknowledge we’re standing on the land of the Salish people” originated, but that acknowledgement and $5 buys you a coffee at FiveBucks (Starbucks). And if I know it, you can bet the native people here know it too.
Yes, we have some woke horror stories here, but no more than in the U.K. or in the U.S.; considerably fewer, I’d guess. Our supposedly “woke” prime minister actually governs much like his dad and all the other Liberal PMs; they talk a left-of-centre game, and govern in a mostly right-of-centre way. True, Justin Trudeau has initiated some woke policies (barely), and his commitment to environmentalism, though mostly performative, is annoying and costly. But for the most part, things continue to plod along quite nicely here, just as they always have. I read the stories from the U.S. and the UK (on Unherd, Spiked, the Critic, and other sites), and those anecdotes are every bit as shocking as those from Canada, and usually much more so.
I’m not trying to pretend that wokeness isn’t a problem here; it is, big time. But no bigger than anywhere else in the anglosphere, and mostly handled in a typically Canadian way. There are exceptions: the B.C. courts’ adoption of the trans activist ideology being the most obvious; some school boards in Ontario doing weird stuff; and our national broadcaster, the CBC, becoming “Indigenous Radio, 24/7” (or so it seems).. But to date, no school girl has been bullied out of her classroom for denying trans ideology or raped by a male in a skirt in a girls’ washroom. Jonathan (“Jessica”) Yaniv’s nasty and frivolous human rights complaint against asian ladies for refusing to wax his male genitals was thrown out by the BC Human Rights Commission and he was ordered to pay costs — admittedly, a rare moment of sanity by our HR Commissions. As usual, the Canadian way is to not make as much of a fuss and just get on with it. Maybe that’s dull, but it works pretty well in my opinion.
I’m a Canadian citizen, lived there for 15 years, visit every year, keep up to date with culture, politics and media there and recognise a woke hellscape when I see one. I should know – I now live in Scotland. Sorry but, despite having very many things to recommend it, Canada is indeed very, very dull. Not quite New Zealand dull, but it’s up there. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, back when Canada was interested in being quietly prosperous and well governed. Now it burns books and criminalises peaceful protest, things even Nicola Sturgeon hasn’t (yet) attempted.
Oh, my family also live in BC, so I’m quite familiar with it.
I also know the Canadian chip on shoulder when the slightest criticism is directed at its self righteous citizenry when I see it. I’m occasionally prone to it myself. That shoulder chip is also very apparent here in Scotland but at least we have actual deep historical presence to support our pearl clutching at the slightest criticism.
So not quite the ‘outsider’ of your fevered imagination. Have a great day, eh.
Last edited 1 year ago by Derek Bryce
Stephen Walsh
1 year ago
Most of this article is spot on. Tragically the statement “The vast majority of educators understand how ridiculous it is to teach infants that they have a gendered soul, or that they are guilty of white privilege” is almost certainly untrue. People indoctrinated from a very young age will not typically have the skills and confidence to push back on this, or even laugh at it. It took decades for the Progressive long march through the institutions to bring society to this sorry point, and it would take decades for a counter-revolution to reverse the damage, if one even began.
Have you seen those freak teachers on Tik Tok? Those people are clearly mockery-immune.
Martin Bollis
1 year ago
Titania McGrath is a work of genius but, as a comedian and satirist, I think Andrew overestimates his power.
The human race has always been quite capable of believing irrational nonsense, to the point of being willing to kill or die for it. Everybody’s belief system reflects, to a considerable extent, the cultural soup in which they were raised.
Children are being exposed to this nonsense daily, not just in schools but from the MSM, popular entertainment, and, of course, social media. It will take more than Mickey taking to turn the tide.
And until we have the courage (both as societies and as individuals) to delve into our psyche to try to understand why the human race is so prone to belief in irrational nonsense, it will continue in one form or another; from religion, through to Marxism and CRT. These are all systems developed to pander to, and enslave people. Rousseau’s “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains” holds true in 2022 as ever it did in the Middle Ages and up to the Enlightenment, whose principles are now unsurprisingly under threat.
Questioning one’s own beliefs is however, different from attempts to indoctrinate populations towards some form of compliance or other. Courage is in short supply, and we see daily how people choose to take the line of least resistance in order to keep their careers on track. Meanwhile, the self-imposed straightjacket is the hardest of all to break free from.
Doyle’s mockery suggestion has some merit, but it’s only possible where both sides (or all sides) of the psychological equation are understood.
Sometimes I think “e’s avin a laff”. A gay man preaching about freedom of speech? Now that IS funny.
Lennon Ó Náraigh
1 year ago
I would be fine if the wokeists indoctrinated their own children… I mean it’s what parents do. Trouble is, the wokeists just don’t produce enough children of their own, so now they have to find other people’s children to indoctrinate as well.
Meanwhile, I have read “Little House on the Prairie” to my children, and yes, there are one or two bits where Ma Ingalls says some horrible things about Native Americans… who murdered her parents… but the parents took the Natives’ lands… but they were fleeing oppression and poverty in Europe.
History is complicated, but kids are smart, they don’t need a trigger warning from Cambridge University to understand that books about the past are… about the past, and that things that were said and done in the past should not really be said and done now.
Are not modern-day pop videos a lot more offensive than a TV series that was a treat back in times, for the young and their grand-parents, when the fare on TV was a lot less than it is today?
Richard 0
1 year ago
I read my children Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven and Famous Five stories. They and I loved them. There’s a few volumes gathering dust in the house and I thought that maybe I should donate them to charity shops. But they might be banned before too long so maybe I should hold on to them and sell them on the dark web – unwoke section – for a small fortune…
They were banned by Nottinghamshire libraries in the Sixties! I believe it was because of the unchallenging reading material rather than anything else though; books from the library had to involve work!
Enid Blyton was a world class story teller – good plots – good descriptions – good characters – bloody good reads.
I only read them from about ten years ago when I discovered her writing – and read everything I could find of hers to my then 3/4 year old daughter for about the next two years until she cold read them herself.
Andrew D
1 year ago
Parents, grandparents and godparents should boycott all publishers producing and promoting this humourless, totalitarian crap. There are still plenty of libraries and second hand shops where pre-bowdlerised literature can be obtained (although I daresay the bonfires are not far away now).
Malcolm Knott
1 year ago
It is extraordinary how people will go with the flow. Some years ago a teacher friend of mine, a woman of strong character and a Tory who had stood as a Tory local government candidate, told me, ‘We all teach them this sub-Marxist stuff. I do it myself.’
J Hop
1 year ago
“Some of these children will doubtless be suffering from a form of gender dysphoria, but most will find such confusions resolved through the natural process of puberty.”
The problem here is that they won’t be allowed to undergo puberty, and often the fact that they are on hormones meant to stop it, before mutilating surgeries, is that the parents aren’t even told about it. I need to sign a release form for my kid to get an aspirin or for her class to visit the park next to the school, but Biden insists that kids be given steralizing drugs that kill healthy sexual, bone and brain development without parent’s consent.
I watch John Oliver’s tv show just in case he covers something interesting, but usually it’s just recycling old jokes about the Queen and how much he hates the U.K.
But last week he actually showed a video from a health professional in the USA who stated, quite baldly, that the impact of puberty blocking drugs is 100% reversible! Another groomers lie.
Meghan Kathleen Jamieson
1 year ago
Children’s books these days are almost inevitably bad. Even the ones that aren’t trying to teach bizarre racial or gender theories are all about telling kids how to behave in the most crass didactic prose. The story only exists as a vehicle to deliver the message. Rather like ponographic films, with similar qualitative results.
There were even some “message” books like that when I was a child and I couldn’t stand them. These things are obvious to most children.
Fran Martinez
1 year ago
This is why they fear Joe Rogan so much.
Charles Lewis
1 year ago
Great article. And I treasure ‘indoctrination of the young is always a temptation for those whose ideas would not withstand adult scrutiny’.
SIMON WOLF
1 year ago
Sky Sports for at least a year were trying to brainwash their viewers with the BLM logo every few minutes .In the case of their under 18 viewers this brainwashing amounted to child abuse.
Angela Chong
1 year ago
I have been googling summer reading list from the 90’s (the ones I read myself) for my elementary/middle school aged children because everything on the best seller lists out there are full of ideologies. And yes, we are reading the whole Little House on the Prairie series and loving it.
Ian Morris
1 year ago
There is a big problem with books for grown ups too. I recently went into Waterstones to try and find a balanced book about climate change. Fat chance ! There were no books available putting intelligent counter arguments to the prevailing catastrophism. Thankfully these are available on Amazon.
I was banned from Waterstones 18 months ago for the heinous crime of repeatedly reshelving the woke racist book Why I’m No Longer Talking to Crackers About Race next to Mein Kampf, an event commemorated on my blog:-
Indoctrinating the youth has arguably been the most successful political strategy for the American left for the past half-century, though it’s less a conscious strategy and more of a lucky break. They concentrated themselves in academia, perhaps because there is so little accountability there, and successfully drove their agenda by sheer force of numbers. Unfortunately for them, COVID lockdowns exposed parents to what their kids curriculum was like, and many did not like what they saw. Now the cat’s out of the bag and parents are trying to take back some control. They’ll eventually succeed one way or another. There won’t be another ‘woke’ generation.
Richard Parker
1 year ago
The “flame purification” ceremony leapt out at me. Dear God. As Heinrich Heine wrote, “Where one burns books, there one later burns people”.
Somehow I just can’t bring myself to laugh at these people any more… or at least, I don’t think I could confidently rely on mockery alone to deal with their malignity.
Brian Villanueva
1 year ago
“This fear that children might be morally corrupted by “problematic” literature might explain the sudden deluge of progressive children’s books on the market”
This fear is hardly unique to progressives. Home educating Christians go to great lengths to control what comes into our houses: books, Internet, movies, etc…
The fact that the Left apparently agrees with us is ironic. They claim to embrace a post-Truth, multiculturalist, pansexual, Rousseau-ian postmodernism. In reality, they appear to be even more Puritanical than we are. Unlike us (a minority), the Left is in a position to make their witch trials and book burnings carry the force of law.
Ruth Bennett
1 year ago
My mother was born in Germany in 1928..starting school in 1935. It did not take long for her to be indoctrinated. Indeed she was shocked that her grand parents had pictures of the Kaiser and Kaiserine in their dining room and not the great Fuhrer. Until American soldiers entered the telephone exchange where she worked she was convinced that Germany was winning the war. Such is the power of ideologists over our children. In Wild Swans, Jung Chan recalls as a teenager during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ berating elderly men for their bourgeoise tendencies (playing chess, wearing glasses). It is frightening what is happening in our schools now- including the private sector. My husband recently visited his old school. In the PPE section of the library were posters, showing Marx, Engels, Keynes etc. No Smith, Hume, Voltaire, Hayek, Friedman or any conservative or liberal thinkers. Oh and copies of the Guardian and New Statemen, but no Times, Telegraph or Spectator.
Tom Lewis
1 year ago
“mockery is always the best way to expose the falsehoods of powerful elites. If there’s one thing that the high priests of this new religion cannot bear, it’s the sound of laughter”
Maybe Rasmus Paludan should consider changing his line of attack, mockery of the ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ brigade is obviously the answer to modern day ‘cultural’ conflict. I doubt anyone would be violently opposed to jokes, or cartoons about ‘their’ shibboleths, trans or otherwise.
Last edited 1 year ago by Tom Lewis
michael swinn
1 year ago
Has the world gone mad, kids playact various roles from the world around them,it is part of growing up. I remember being married to the girl over the road when I was about six and my kids turning the wardrobe in their hotel room into a space rocket. It is patently obvious that some of these ideologs have never had children!
John Byk
1 year ago
The author of this article has clearly not spend any amount of significant time in a K-12 classroom.
Dustshoe Richinrut
1 year ago
Kids these days should be having a laugh at watching Buster Keaton running rings round the Keystone Cops. Not busting a gut running through reams of notes on how to successfully walk on eggshells through their short childhoods. The West is truly shooting itself in the foot. Like one of those zany Keystone cops. Maybe it’s a plot by the anti-civilisationists – to extinguish humour and wit and comic self-parody, the bread and butter stuff of a free society. Even 1980s pop music was rife with ironical humour and self-parody. Not like the asinine stuff of late.
Ian Stewart
1 year ago
The new Doctor Who and his trans assistant. That represents the ideal Britain to children, and it will affect their outlook in life. This is the activists in action.
Ian Stewart
1 year ago
Just wrote to the producers of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight to point out that their recent claim in the show that puberty blockers for children are 100% reversible isn’t accurate, as the long term effects of these powerful drugs on children isn’t scientifically known, as the NHS website explains.
Probably won’t get a response. Can OFCOM ping them if they’ve stated a medical issue as fact when it isn’t?
Ruth Bennett
1 year ago
“Trauma”. Tell that to my Ukrainian family – dad and adult son on the front line, home and business shelled. Mum and boy exhibiting stiff upper lip in spite of their terrible situation. They are experiencing trauma, not the cosseted, hysterical Amazon staff. who should be ashamed of themselves. Perhaps they should experience real trauma, then they would no what is real.
Ruth Bennett,
In this time of nonsense, decadence and self-pity throughout the West, the Ukrainians have been showing us another side of humanity. It’s not just the fortitude and courage but also the self-reliance and creative thinking (especially on the battlefield) and the sense of focus.
I was amazed to see photos of crews out repairing phone lines in the battered suburbs of Kiyv already. And women returning with their kids long before the war is won or lost. Brava!
Martin Terrell
1 year ago
I think you may have been right a few years ago, when Titania was not taken seriously. We now have a lot of young people who have grown up with this stuff – peergroups and teachers have a lot more influence than we think.
William Buckley
1 year ago
A very interesting and well argued article (as always), from Andrew. I agree that the ideology in the books he critiques, is laughable, I wish I could though be as confident as he is, about the capacity of children to “see through the bullshit”. Teachers are hugely influential, as is groupthink. Witness those terrible scenes that have been recently reported in a girls private school. To really address the issue, the thinking and philosophy of the NEU and such organisations (and individuals) needs to be tackled head on by other teachers, academic institutions and government (and parents of course).The whole edifice of this ideology needs exposed by those directly involved, accountable and with the power to influence events in schools and in the classroom, for it’s illogicality, unreality, dishonesty and destructiveness.
0 0
1 year ago
Mary was a Virgin.
Say it enough & it becomes true.
Andrew Langridge
1 year ago
I was brought up to believe that Britain won WW2 on her own, that the empire, on which the ‘sun never set’ was a manifestation of our natural superiority over other nations. History classes glossed over the slave trade, the Indian mutiny and the Amritsar massacre. Was this not just as much ideology as the current obsession with identity and woke issues?
What school was this? It sounds an odd one! Nevertheless the issue is not really about avoiding ideology but choosing your ideology wisely. Part of the reason for our present predicament is the misguided notion that a truly non-ideological position is desirable or even attainable.
Last edited 1 year ago by Ernest Brown
Ernest Brown
1 year ago
It’s certainly possible that when the current 5 year olds enter teenage rebellion the idea of there being 2 sexes may seem delightfully heterodox and be embraced enthusiastically by them. I don’t think we should be complacent though – once bad ideas become law they are hard to fight.
Charles Rigby
1 year ago
Young people need to be empowered to learn for their exams and also for life
Teaching is nothing unless it inspires learning
Much of the aspiration and confidence which is required to succeed is extra curricular
That’s where the English model is so successful
Sue Whorton
1 year ago
Laughter has always been the weapon against devils.
AGA Johanna
1 year ago
I see the author, and most of it’s readers who comment, don’t know the difference between ‘SEX’ and ‘Gender’ and how the two are not the same thing at all.
When it comes to all y’all complaining about the indoctrination of children, you’re more upset about Gender and sexuality, but I haven’t read a single complaint about religious indoctrination. weird
Here’s some factual information:
1- Nobody can choose or be convinced of their sexuality, gay, straight or bisexual. You either are or you are not
2-Nobody can be indoctrinated or convinced to be transgender. This has sadly been proven in a horrible twin study, based in Canada, in the late 60s, where one twin infant accidentally had his p***s burnt off in a circumcision accident. A psychiatrist, Dr. Money (yes, his real name) convinced his parents, to raise Bian Reimer as a girl, never telling him he was born a boy. It didn’t work, by age 14 he fully worked out his Gender, and in the 80s, he drove himself to an IGA car park and blew out his brains
Now science through neurology studies has worked out that Transgender people, who have not started cross-sex hormones, have brains physically more similar information and function to that of the sex they identify with. This is significant.
Also, the only reason we apparently are seeing a rise in young people coming out as gay, lesbian or trans, is because it’s easier now to come out than it was 10, 20, or 30+ years ago, not because of Gender theory, or indoctrination
I don’t think laughter suffices. We need to start treating these people as the sadistic paedophiles which they are.
No laughter won’t suffice when it’s schools, as this article about the harassment of a schoolgirl who challenged the trans ideology attests to.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10828431/JK-Rowling-condemns-utterly-shameful-treatment-school-pupil-18-caught-trans-row.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490
This is absolutely disgusting when you can’t even say biological truth anymore you might as well just called the public schools fantasy schools because they’re just indoctrinating our children into believing these fantasies are realities when that is just not the case it is causing real damage to our youth and they are killing themselves after transitioning and realizing it was a big mistake
I have many friends and family members in the dull but (once) worthy country of Canada, sadly turning into a woke hellscape under the ministrations of the vapid Justin Trudeau. I’ve two recent tales to relate:
The barbarians are at the gates, folks.
Yeah, I think some of that lesbian stuff is just kids following this mindset (at least I think that’s true of two of my daughters who insisted they were gay at age 8-9 and now as teens date boys):
Then pubberty hits. Game changer.
What exactly is ‘translanguaging’?
It’s also known as a load of codswallop – but much worse than that – but I refrain from following the LibDem Sir inconsequential in his use of bollox.
I think we would call it ‘bad grammar’.
Your guess is as good as mine but I suspect it goes a little somethin’ like this:
https://youtu.be/P5eZ3MiCfPs
Woke schidtt.
Authentic frontier gibberish.
Reminds me of my social sciences tutor whose first degree was Englis with his tutor being CS Lewis. Any verbiage in essays would receive the margin comment of “This is nice. what does it mean”. Precision, even pedantry is so important.
Trudeau really is the Canadian Clinton, isn’t he?
Your friends are indeed complicit in their child’s grooming. You should tell them she probably won’t thank them for allowing it to happen when she grows up.
Please do explain to your Canadian friends that 9 is far too young to decide about one’s sexual orientation. She can make a decision after puberty. This is all a toxic fashion which will cause much suffering to many youngsters (while some people/ companies are making big bucks out of this fashion).
I agree. It’s deeply unsettling.
I’ve lived in “dull” Canada for all but three of my 67 years. The only dull and/or boring thing about it is hearing outsiders talk about how dull it is. As for the so-called “hellscape”, I now live in Vancouver, BC, which is the beating heart and soul of leftism/identity politics etc., in this country, and as hellscapes go, it’s still pretty nice here. Yes, this is the place where “we acknowledge we’re standing on the land of the Salish people” originated, but that acknowledgement and $5 buys you a coffee at FiveBucks (Starbucks). And if I know it, you can bet the native people here know it too.
Yes, we have some woke horror stories here, but no more than in the U.K. or in the U.S.; considerably fewer, I’d guess. Our supposedly “woke” prime minister actually governs much like his dad and all the other Liberal PMs; they talk a left-of-centre game, and govern in a mostly right-of-centre way. True, Justin Trudeau has initiated some woke policies (barely), and his commitment to environmentalism, though mostly performative, is annoying and costly. But for the most part, things continue to plod along quite nicely here, just as they always have. I read the stories from the U.S. and the UK (on Unherd, Spiked, the Critic, and other sites), and those anecdotes are every bit as shocking as those from Canada, and usually much more so.
I’m not trying to pretend that wokeness isn’t a problem here; it is, big time. But no bigger than anywhere else in the anglosphere, and mostly handled in a typically Canadian way. There are exceptions: the B.C. courts’ adoption of the trans activist ideology being the most obvious; some school boards in Ontario doing weird stuff; and our national broadcaster, the CBC, becoming “Indigenous Radio, 24/7” (or so it seems).. But to date, no school girl has been bullied out of her classroom for denying trans ideology or raped by a male in a skirt in a girls’ washroom. Jonathan (“Jessica”) Yaniv’s nasty and frivolous human rights complaint against asian ladies for refusing to wax his male genitals was thrown out by the BC Human Rights Commission and he was ordered to pay costs — admittedly, a rare moment of sanity by our HR Commissions. As usual, the Canadian way is to not make as much of a fuss and just get on with it. Maybe that’s dull, but it works pretty well in my opinion.
I’m a Canadian citizen, lived there for 15 years, visit every year, keep up to date with culture, politics and media there and recognise a woke hellscape when I see one. I should know – I now live in Scotland. Sorry but, despite having very many things to recommend it, Canada is indeed very, very dull. Not quite New Zealand dull, but it’s up there. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, back when Canada was interested in being quietly prosperous and well governed. Now it burns books and criminalises peaceful protest, things even Nicola Sturgeon hasn’t (yet) attempted.
Oh, my family also live in BC, so I’m quite familiar with it.
I also know the Canadian chip on shoulder when the slightest criticism is directed at its self righteous citizenry when I see it. I’m occasionally prone to it myself. That shoulder chip is also very apparent here in Scotland but at least we have actual deep historical presence to support our pearl clutching at the slightest criticism.
So not quite the ‘outsider’ of your fevered imagination. Have a great day, eh.
Most of this article is spot on. Tragically the statement “The vast majority of educators understand how ridiculous it is to teach infants that they have a gendered soul, or that they are guilty of white privilege” is almost certainly untrue. People indoctrinated from a very young age will not typically have the skills and confidence to push back on this, or even laugh at it. It took decades for the Progressive long march through the institutions to bring society to this sorry point, and it would take decades for a counter-revolution to reverse the damage, if one even began.
Have you seen those freak teachers on Tik Tok? Those people are clearly mockery-immune.
Titania McGrath is a work of genius but, as a comedian and satirist, I think Andrew overestimates his power.
The human race has always been quite capable of believing irrational nonsense, to the point of being willing to kill or die for it. Everybody’s belief system reflects, to a considerable extent, the cultural soup in which they were raised.
Children are being exposed to this nonsense daily, not just in schools but from the MSM, popular entertainment, and, of course, social media. It will take more than Mickey taking to turn the tide.
And until we have the courage (both as societies and as individuals) to delve into our psyche to try to understand why the human race is so prone to belief in irrational nonsense, it will continue in one form or another; from religion, through to Marxism and CRT. These are all systems developed to pander to, and enslave people. Rousseau’s “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains” holds true in 2022 as ever it did in the Middle Ages and up to the Enlightenment, whose principles are now unsurprisingly under threat.
Questioning one’s own beliefs is however, different from attempts to indoctrinate populations towards some form of compliance or other. Courage is in short supply, and we see daily how people choose to take the line of least resistance in order to keep their careers on track. Meanwhile, the self-imposed straightjacket is the hardest of all to break free from.
Doyle’s mockery suggestion has some merit, but it’s only possible where both sides (or all sides) of the psychological equation are understood.
Sometimes I think “e’s avin a laff”. A gay man preaching about freedom of speech? Now that IS funny.
I would be fine if the wokeists indoctrinated their own children… I mean it’s what parents do. Trouble is, the wokeists just don’t produce enough children of their own, so now they have to find other people’s children to indoctrinate as well.
Meanwhile, I have read “Little House on the Prairie” to my children, and yes, there are one or two bits where Ma Ingalls says some horrible things about Native Americans… who murdered her parents… but the parents took the Natives’ lands… but they were fleeing oppression and poverty in Europe.
History is complicated, but kids are smart, they don’t need a trigger warning from Cambridge University to understand that books about the past are… about the past, and that things that were said and done in the past should not really be said and done now.
Are not modern-day pop videos a lot more offensive than a TV series that was a treat back in times, for the young and their grand-parents, when the fare on TV was a lot less than it is today?
I read my children Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven and Famous Five stories. They and I loved them. There’s a few volumes gathering dust in the house and I thought that maybe I should donate them to charity shops. But they might be banned before too long so maybe I should hold on to them and sell them on the dark web – unwoke section – for a small fortune…
They were banned by Nottinghamshire libraries in the Sixties! I believe it was because of the unchallenging reading material rather than anything else though; books from the library had to involve work!
Enid Blyton was a world class story teller – good plots – good descriptions – good characters – bloody good reads.
I only read them from about ten years ago when I discovered her writing – and read everything I could find of hers to my then 3/4 year old daughter for about the next two years until she cold read them herself.
Parents, grandparents and godparents should boycott all publishers producing and promoting this humourless, totalitarian crap. There are still plenty of libraries and second hand shops where pre-bowdlerised literature can be obtained (although I daresay the bonfires are not far away now).
It is extraordinary how people will go with the flow. Some years ago a teacher friend of mine, a woman of strong character and a Tory who had stood as a Tory local government candidate, told me, ‘We all teach them this sub-Marxist stuff. I do it myself.’
“Some of these children will doubtless be suffering from a form of gender dysphoria, but most will find such confusions resolved through the natural process of puberty.”
The problem here is that they won’t be allowed to undergo puberty, and often the fact that they are on hormones meant to stop it, before mutilating surgeries, is that the parents aren’t even told about it. I need to sign a release form for my kid to get an aspirin or for her class to visit the park next to the school, but Biden insists that kids be given steralizing drugs that kill healthy sexual, bone and brain development without parent’s consent.
Right side of history my a**.
I watch John Oliver’s tv show just in case he covers something interesting, but usually it’s just recycling old jokes about the Queen and how much he hates the U.K.
But last week he actually showed a video from a health professional in the USA who stated, quite baldly, that the impact of puberty blocking drugs is 100% reversible! Another groomers lie.
Children’s books these days are almost inevitably bad. Even the ones that aren’t trying to teach bizarre racial or gender theories are all about telling kids how to behave in the most crass didactic prose. The story only exists as a vehicle to deliver the message. Rather like ponographic films, with similar qualitative results.
There were even some “message” books like that when I was a child and I couldn’t stand them. These things are obvious to most children.
This is why they fear Joe Rogan so much.
Great article. And I treasure
‘indoctrination of the young is always a temptation for those whose ideas would not withstand adult scrutiny’.
Sky Sports for at least a year were trying to brainwash their viewers with the BLM logo every few minutes .In the case of their under 18 viewers this brainwashing amounted to child abuse.
I have been googling summer reading list from the 90’s (the ones I read myself) for my elementary/middle school aged children because everything on the best seller lists out there are full of ideologies. And yes, we are reading the whole Little House on the Prairie series and loving it.
There is a big problem with books for grown ups too. I recently went into Waterstones to try and find a balanced book about climate change. Fat chance ! There were no books available putting intelligent counter arguments to the prevailing catastrophism. Thankfully these are available on Amazon.
I was banned from Waterstones 18 months ago for the heinous crime of repeatedly reshelving the woke racist book Why I’m No Longer Talking to Crackers About Race next to Mein Kampf, an event commemorated on my blog:-
Indoctrinating the youth has arguably been the most successful political strategy for the American left for the past half-century, though it’s less a conscious strategy and more of a lucky break. They concentrated themselves in academia, perhaps because there is so little accountability there, and successfully drove their agenda by sheer force of numbers. Unfortunately for them, COVID lockdowns exposed parents to what their kids curriculum was like, and many did not like what they saw. Now the cat’s out of the bag and parents are trying to take back some control. They’ll eventually succeed one way or another. There won’t be another ‘woke’ generation.
The “flame purification” ceremony leapt out at me. Dear God. As Heinrich Heine wrote, “Where one burns books, there one later burns people”.
Somehow I just can’t bring myself to laugh at these people any more… or at least, I don’t think I could confidently rely on mockery alone to deal with their malignity.
“This fear that children might be morally corrupted by “problematic” literature might explain the sudden deluge of progressive children’s books on the market”
This fear is hardly unique to progressives. Home educating Christians go to great lengths to control what comes into our houses: books, Internet, movies, etc…
The fact that the Left apparently agrees with us is ironic. They claim to embrace a post-Truth, multiculturalist, pansexual, Rousseau-ian postmodernism. In reality, they appear to be even more Puritanical than we are. Unlike us (a minority), the Left is in a position to make their witch trials and book burnings carry the force of law.
My mother was born in Germany in 1928..starting school in 1935. It did not take long for her to be indoctrinated. Indeed she was shocked that her grand parents had pictures of the Kaiser and Kaiserine in their dining room and not the great Fuhrer. Until American soldiers entered the telephone exchange where she worked she was convinced that Germany was winning the war. Such is the power of ideologists over our children. In Wild Swans, Jung Chan recalls as a teenager during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ berating elderly men for their bourgeoise tendencies (playing chess, wearing glasses). It is frightening what is happening in our schools now- including the private sector. My husband recently visited his old school. In the PPE section of the library were posters, showing Marx, Engels, Keynes etc. No Smith, Hume, Voltaire, Hayek, Friedman or any conservative or liberal thinkers. Oh and copies of the Guardian and New Statemen, but no Times, Telegraph or Spectator.
“mockery is always the best way to expose the falsehoods of powerful elites. If there’s one thing that the high priests of this new religion cannot bear, it’s the sound of laughter”
Maybe Rasmus Paludan should consider changing his line of attack, mockery of the ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ brigade is obviously the answer to modern day ‘cultural’ conflict. I doubt anyone would be violently opposed to jokes, or cartoons about ‘their’ shibboleths, trans or otherwise.
Has the world gone mad, kids playact various roles from the world around them,it is part of growing up. I remember being married to the girl over the road when I was about six and my kids turning the wardrobe in their hotel room into a space rocket. It is patently obvious that some of these ideologs have never had children!
The author of this article has clearly not spend any amount of significant time in a K-12 classroom.
Kids these days should be having a laugh at watching Buster Keaton running rings round the Keystone Cops. Not busting a gut running through reams of notes on how to successfully walk on eggshells through their short childhoods. The West is truly shooting itself in the foot. Like one of those zany Keystone cops. Maybe it’s a plot by the anti-civilisationists – to extinguish humour and wit and comic self-parody, the bread and butter stuff of a free society. Even 1980s pop music was rife with ironical humour and self-parody. Not like the asinine stuff of late.
The new Doctor Who and his trans assistant. That represents the ideal Britain to children, and it will affect their outlook in life. This is the activists in action.
Just wrote to the producers of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight to point out that their recent claim in the show that puberty blockers for children are 100% reversible isn’t accurate, as the long term effects of these powerful drugs on children isn’t scientifically known, as the NHS website explains.
Probably won’t get a response. Can OFCOM ping them if they’ve stated a medical issue as fact when it isn’t?
“Trauma”. Tell that to my Ukrainian family – dad and adult son on the front line, home and business shelled. Mum and boy exhibiting stiff upper lip in spite of their terrible situation. They are experiencing trauma, not the cosseted, hysterical Amazon staff. who should be ashamed of themselves. Perhaps they should experience real trauma, then they would no what is real.
Ruth Bennett,
In this time of nonsense, decadence and self-pity throughout the West, the Ukrainians have been showing us another side of humanity. It’s not just the fortitude and courage but also the self-reliance and creative thinking (especially on the battlefield) and the sense of focus.
I was amazed to see photos of crews out repairing phone lines in the battered suburbs of Kiyv already. And women returning with their kids long before the war is won or lost. Brava!
I think you may have been right a few years ago, when Titania was not taken seriously. We now have a lot of young people who have grown up with this stuff – peergroups and teachers have a lot more influence than we think.
A very interesting and well argued article (as always), from Andrew. I agree that the ideology in the books he critiques, is laughable, I wish I could though be as confident as he is, about the capacity of children to “see through the bullshit”. Teachers are hugely influential, as is groupthink. Witness those terrible scenes that have been recently reported in a girls private school. To really address the issue, the thinking and philosophy of the NEU and such organisations (and individuals) needs to be tackled head on by other teachers, academic institutions and government (and parents of course).The whole edifice of this ideology needs exposed by those directly involved, accountable and with the power to influence events in schools and in the classroom, for it’s illogicality, unreality, dishonesty and destructiveness.
Mary was a Virgin.
Say it enough & it becomes true.
I was brought up to believe that Britain won WW2 on her own, that the empire, on which the ‘sun never set’ was a manifestation of our natural superiority over other nations. History classes glossed over the slave trade, the Indian mutiny and the Amritsar massacre. Was this not just as much ideology as the current obsession with identity and woke issues?
What school was this? It sounds an odd one! Nevertheless the issue is not really about avoiding ideology but choosing your ideology wisely. Part of the reason for our present predicament is the misguided notion that a truly non-ideological position is desirable or even attainable.
It’s certainly possible that when the current 5 year olds enter teenage rebellion the idea of there being 2 sexes may seem delightfully heterodox and be embraced enthusiastically by them. I don’t think we should be complacent though – once bad ideas become law they are hard to fight.
Young people need to be empowered to learn for their exams and also for life
Teaching is nothing unless it inspires learning
Much of the aspiration and confidence which is required to succeed is extra curricular
That’s where the English model is so successful
Laughter has always been the weapon against devils.
I see the author, and most of it’s readers who comment, don’t know the difference between ‘SEX’ and ‘Gender’ and how the two are not the same thing at all.
When it comes to all y’all complaining about the indoctrination of children, you’re more upset about Gender and sexuality, but I haven’t read a single complaint about religious indoctrination. weird
Here’s some factual information:
1- Nobody can choose or be convinced of their sexuality, gay, straight or bisexual. You either are or you are not
2-Nobody can be indoctrinated or convinced to be transgender. This has sadly been proven in a horrible twin study, based in Canada, in the late 60s, where one twin infant accidentally had his p***s burnt off in a circumcision accident. A psychiatrist, Dr. Money (yes, his real name) convinced his parents, to raise Bian Reimer as a girl, never telling him he was born a boy. It didn’t work, by age 14 he fully worked out his Gender, and in the 80s, he drove himself to an IGA car park and blew out his brains
Now science through neurology studies has worked out that Transgender people, who have not started cross-sex hormones, have brains physically more similar information and function to that of the sex they identify with. This is significant.
Also, the only reason we apparently are seeing a rise in young people coming out as gay, lesbian or trans, is because it’s easier now to come out than it was 10, 20, or 30+ years ago, not because of Gender theory, or indoctrination