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UK: Those Birmingham parents are right
Teaching primary-age schoolkids about sexual matters is weird
Liberal and left-leaning observers have found themselves doing something they never normally do: criticising Muslims.
Specifically Muslim parents in Birmingham who have successfully pressured the local primary school to stop teaching their kids about homosexuality and transgenderism. Apparently it is outrageous for parents to exercise moral authority over their very young children and instead they should trust the state to impart the correct moral wisdom to their offspring. That’s the undertone of the coverage of this controversy: that officialdom knows better than a child’s own parents how that child should be raised and morally instructed.
The school in question is Parkfield Community School in Saltley, Birmingham. The school has a very large number of Muslim pupils. The parents of these pupils have been kicking up a storm over the school’s ‘challenging homophobia’ programme, which involves teaching the kids about gay relationships and the transgender lifestyle. They have protested outside the school with placards saying ‘No to the promotion of homosexuality to our children’ and ‘Education not indoctrination’. On Friday, 600 Muslim children aged between four and 11 were withdrawn from school for the day in protest. The school has reportedly given in to the parents and says it will no longer make it mandatory for all pupils to engage in discussions on homophobia.
Cue fury among the commentariat and in humanist circles. State-funded institutions should not capitulate to backward religious views, they say. At least we now know there is one group of people who come above Muslims in the chattering classes’ sympathy stakes: gay and trans kids. We are told that the right of gay and trans kids to feel safe and loved at school should override the right of parents to object to the teaching of certain sexual matters and ideas. This is wrong. Let’s leave to one side the problem of referring to kids as young as six and seven as ‘gay’ or ‘trans’ when such children are not sexual beings, far less au fait with the eccentric genderfluid thinking behind the transgender ideology – the more important point is that parental rights over children’s moral lives are incredibly important and must be defended.
Horrendous as this may seem to those who think they are right about everything, the fact is there are people out there who disagree with you about numerous moral and personal matters. There are communities that do not think same-sex marriage is morally equal to traditional marriage. There are people who do not believe a man can ever become a woman, no matter how many hormones he takes or surgeries he undergoes. There are fairly significant numbers of people who don’t agree that their kids should be taught about gay sex or any kind of sex for that matter.
Biology lessons are one thing – every teenager should be taught the scientific reality of penises, vaginas, babies, etc. But sexual education, relationships education, education which seeks not only to provide children with scientific facts, but also to shape them morally, to make them view everyday life through a particular PC lens – many people disagree with this. They would rather their kids were taught maths, English, science, history and sport, not why it is outrageously wrong to refer to a trans-woman as ‘he’.
When it comes to moral and religious matters, parents should exercise the greater authority over their children. It is crucial for the sovereignty of the family and the rights of parents that their moral purview is not casually traduced by officials who presume to know better. Does this mean parents who don’t believe in the Big Bang can take their kids out of physics lessons? Nope. This is an established piece of scientific knowledge and a rounded education demands the teaching of it.
Does it mean Muslim parents can demand gender-segregated classrooms? Again, absolutely not. Female equality is a long-established norm in the United Kingdom and it is right that nothing is done to undermine it, including in schools. But sexual-relationships education is something new. Transgenderism even newer. The idea that children as young as five should be educated about gay and trans people is an idea that didn’t exist just a few years ago – and as such it is parents’ right, everyone’s right in fact, to push back against it. It is their right to say: ‘This is a moral step too far and it undermines what my kid learns in the home.’
Something sinister is happening in both official and campaigning circles: people are using children, very young children, to try to reshape adult thinking and society more broadly. Perhaps fearing they will not be able to convince actual adults that transgenderism is a good idea or that children as young as six can be ‘gay’, instead the new moral instructors seek to inculcate kids with these ideas in the hope that the ideas will then filter into the home and into stupid adults’ brains. It is a highly undemocratic and sly way to try to bring about social change. If you want that school in Birmingham to teach children about gay and trans lifestyles, then convince the parents first – don’t use the kids as moral shields against what you clearly view as the imbecilic, backward adults they tragically have to go home to every night.
What a strange situation Britain finds itself in. When backward Islamist ideas are expressed on campus or in public life, liberals and leftists say very little and sometimes even accuse the critics of these ideas of ‘Islamophobia’. And so today’s growing and genuinely problematic Islamist outlook is never really confronted. But when Muslim parents demand something that is reasonable, something that many Christian and Jewish parents also desire – that is, the right to oversee their children’s internal moral lives – there is uproar. Islamist ideology goes unchallenged; appropriate Muslim concern with the state indoctrination of young children causes fury. Everything is turned on its head.
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It’s Time for Congress to Defend Free Speech on Campus
As an undergraduate student during the ‘60s, the Vietnam War was often on our minds and in our conversations.
I vividly remember the discussions. Students were debating professors and each another. Ideas were being exchanged, opinions formed, and unique perspectives shared.
I saw firsthand how college campuses across the nation were hubs of free speech—and some of that speech I vehemently disagreed with, in all honesty. Yet as a soldier years later, I would fight to protect and defend this right to free speech. As a country, we were best served by allowing all sides to passionately argue their views.
In the decades since, our colleges’ commitment to protecting free speech has eroded. Examples have piled up of students silencing and attacking speakers with whom they disagree, as well as students being arrested for violating their college’s policies on “free speech zones.”
Time and again, university leaders stand by and just allow this to happen.
The designation of a “free speech zone” is a particularly egregious example of how colleges limit free speech. These small parcels of land—often just a tiny fraction of the campus—are the only places students can freely engage in expressive activity, such as distributing fliers or holding a rally or protest. Students caught engaging in these activities outside the free speech zone can be subject to arrest, harassment, and discipline.
Roughly 10 percent of American colleges now restrict constitutionally protected speech to a particular corner of campus, according to a recent report, and 30 percent of colleges have restrictive speech codes. These regulations prohibit the kind of student expression that is typically protected by the First Amendment.
And disturbingly, students increasingly approve of these policies. A national study last year found that about one-third of students supported restricting free speech on their own college campus.
President Donald Trump has shown a strong commitment to protecting the free speech rights of college students. He recently announced an executive order that will require colleges to honor free speech on their campuses in order to remain eligible for up to $26 billion of federal research funding.
The president’s proposal sheds critical light on this issue. We should continue to send a strong message to institutions of higher education that free speech restrictions are at odds with our constitutional rights.
Congress likewise cannot sit idly by while college campuses restrict free speech. For this reason, I have introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives supporting the right to free speech, and admonishing institutions that aim to limit this right. It also calls on universities to abolish their free speech zones and recommit themselves to protecting the free and open exchange of ideas.
My resolution affirms the House of Representatives’ commitment to being a guardian of free speech in America, including on college and university campuses. This isn’t about protecting conservative or liberal viewpoints. It’s about encouraging conservative and liberal viewpoints, and all viewpoints in between.
Twenty-one colleagues of mine in the House have co-sponsored this resolution, and I will continue to work on growing that number.
Fostering intellectual curiosity, robust debate, and passionate discussion on college campuses is vital for our nation’s strength and future. Passing this resolution will send a message to colleges and students throughout the country that the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment are alive and well in the 21st century.
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KY: How Teachers Unions Are Holding Children With Special Needs Hostage
Teacher unions are now using strikes as a form of extortion.
For the second time this year, a state’s teachers union and its members have closed schools and are refusing to work until lawmakers stop considering proposals to give students with special needs more learning opportunities.
In recent days, the Kentucky teachers union, and administrators and teachers, in Jefferson, Bullitt, and Oldham counties closed schools and protested at the Capitol chanting “Teachers vote!”
Their opposition is to a proposal that would allow some K-12 students in Kentucky—including children in the foster care system and children with special needs—to access scholarships to attend private schools.
Unions, district administrators, and teachers are no longer just demanding higher pay, the issue at the center of the strikes and school closures in 2018. Now, they want to run the Capitol.
Kentucky teachers from the state’s largest district, Jefferson County, are making demands in spite of years of critical reports about district operations. The Louisville Courier-Journal reported three years ago this week that Jefferson County was grossly underreporting the number of times it physically restrained children with special needs.
It reported that the district drastically underreported the number of times children with special needs were “physically held down” or “confined to a room.”
The newspaper said that district records showed officials used physical restraint or removal on children with special needs some 4,400 times, but that Jefferson County Public Schools only reported 174 cases.
At one school, reporters found that “school staff slammed students’ heads into walls.”
District board members and national advocates for children with special needs said they were shocked by the scope of the findings.
The Courier-Journal reported problems were continuing as recently as last month.
It should be no wonder, then, that lawmakers are considering providing children in the state with more school options. And as more of the Jefferson County Public Schools’ woes are made public, parents should be demanding nothing less.
As if that weren’t enough of a problem, Jefferson County Public Schools have struggled to bridge a yawning achievement gap between minority students and their peers.
The Bluegrass Institute’s staff education analyst, Richard Innes, looked at Kentucky’s progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called “the nation’s report card,” and didn’t like what he saw.
“Based on Kentucky’s performance so far, it will literally take several centuries for the state’s black students to reach a reasonably high rate of proficiency on NAEP reading assessments in both the fourth and eighth grades,” Innes says.
There are also reports of indefensible overhead expenses. As research by The Heritage Foundation reported last year, a 2014 audit found Jefferson County Public Schools had 150 central office positions making $100,000 or more annually, a figure that far exceeded other districts of similar size around the country.
A 2018 management audit of the district said there is “a pattern of a significant lack of efficiency and effectiveness in the governance and administration of [Jefferson County Public Schools].”
These strikes are part of a disturbing trend. About two weeks ago, the West Virginia teachers union and its members refused to work because lawmakers considered a proposal that would have allowed for the creation of seven charter schools in the state and 1,000 education savings accounts.
As in Kentucky, children with special needs would have been among the beneficiaries of these new learning opportunities.
In the wake of strikes last spring—which, then as now, included teachers unions in Kentucky and West Virginia—lawmakers gave in to union demands, agreeing to raise teacher salaries and even increase taxes in some states in order to spend more on government schools.
Yet state legislators did not ask for anything in return. Such inaction is remarkable considering the disturbing Jefferson County Public Schools audits in Kentucky, or the examples researchers found of vacant and underused school buildings that districts left open at taxpayer expense in states such as Arizona and Oklahoma.
It should come as no surprise, then, that unions are closing schools and refusing to work again this year—this time in an effort to intimidate lawmakers into abandoning certain education policy reforms.
It’s a tragedy that children with special needs will be losing out.
Lawmakers need to remember that they represent the children and families in their states—along with the unions and their members who are breaking the law by going on strike.
State legislators should point to the waste and inefficiencies in places such as Jefferson County Public Schools and say families at least deserve the option to choose where and how their children learn.
Before deliberating over spending increases, lawmakers should at least call for school district leaders to improve district operations and eliminate waste.
Until that happens, teachers unions will continue to be the schoolyard bully.
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