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Australia: Drag queens teach preschool children about 'inclusion and diversity' at local libraries - as critics slam the 'storytelling' sessions as 'inappropriate'
I find drag queens disgusting. They are just men mocking women and I like real women very much. Drag queens are offensive. Are conservatives allowed to be offended? It seems not
Drag queens are reading story books to pre-school children in public libraries to promote 'diversity and inclusion' among the new generation.
The controversial storytelling events - which have previously been met with strong opposition in Melbourne - have been scheduled across Sydney in the past year.
While supporters claim the public readings promote open-mindedness, critics such as New South Wales Upper House MP Mark Latham have hit out at their 'inappropriate' nature.
One event due to be held earlier this year in Kogarah, southern Sydney, billed itself as a chance for children 'to experience positive and inclusive role models in a fun environment'.
Another in Erskineville last year fronted by high-profile drag queen Hannah Conda encouraged attendees to bring their own dresses and wigs along.
Fellow entertainer Charisma Belle, another well-known proponent of the scheme, told The Daily Telegraph the events were there for children 'unable to express themselves properly'.
'Drag story time is about opening a dialogue between parents and their children,' she said.
'Part of my job as a drag performer is to educate and challenge the misinformation that is spread about my community.'
Georges River Council said the event at Kogarah Library had kept its place in their calendar due to its high popularity.
But Mr Latham, One Nation's NSW state leader, has expressed his concern the events serve as a 'backdoor' for the Safe Schools campaign - which pushes for greater inclusion for LGBTI students.
'Given the way the drag queen program is pushed in municipal libraries, it's highly appropriate for the Education Minister to issue a general directive through NSW schools they must not be part of school libraries,' he said.
Last year, the Drag Storytime with Miss Roxee drag queen reading in Wollongong attracted the anger of social media commenters.
Negative feedback ranged from those who accused the central library where it was held of spreading 'propaganda' and 'sexualising children'.
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UK: It’s time to stop obsessing about Oxbridge
At this time of year I have a feeling of remembered dread. For more than a decade, late summer meant exam results, which never brought joy, only relief or disappointment. Either the child had performed as well as expected, in which case the train remained on the track towards some respectable university and occupation, or it hadn’t, in which case the locomotive threatened to come off the rails, and the household was plunged into gloom.
My worst August was the one when my son, who had neglected to work for his A levels, lost a conditional place at Oxford. I was devastated: he had had within his grasp the most prestigious of educational prizes, the name that opens all doors, the key to a prosperous future, the source of innumerable metaphors gesturing towards a life full of opportunity, money, satisfaction and status — and, through his teenage fecklessness, had thrown it away.
I am now faintly embarrassed by my hysteria but I think it was par for the course. Middle-class Brits obsess about Oxbridge. The effort of getting our children into those two universities consumes startling amounts of money, time and emotion in leafy suburbs and Georgian terraces. It has something to do with their age: in a country hung up on its heritage, we love the idea of our children tripping through medieval cloisters in the footsteps of saints and scholars. But it’s mostly about power and prestige which, by a single measure, those institutions monopolise to an extraordinary extent. Of 57 prime ministers, 43 went to Oxbridge, 11 didn’t go to university at all (Winston Churchill and John Major among them) and three (Earl Russell, Neville Chamberlain and Gordon Brown) went to other universities.
In our globalised age, while all other British brands have sunk into oblivion, Oxbridge has retained its status. British companies? Forgotten: the big brands are all American. Bands? Haven’t had a big one in a long while. The BBC? Overshadowed by Amazon and Netflix. But Oxford and Cambridge still, regularly, ace the global university league tables. Times Higher Education, one of the three that count, currently has Oxford in first place and Cambridge second. Why wouldn’t British parents obsess about getting their children, for no more money than it costs to go to a rubbish institution, into the best university in the world? Who would criticise me for being devastated when my son messed up?
I would, now. The more I’ve pondered our obsession with Oxford and Cambridge on our country, the worse I think it is for us. The intense competition to get into those two universities shapes the whole of our education system. It encourages us to impoverish ourselves by sending our children to expensive private secondary schools, to coach our children to exhaustion and to drill them for exams. It fuels our snobbish tendency swiftly to judge people on irrelevant criteria and raise them up or write them off in seconds. And, because our population is growing and Oxbridge is taking fewer British students, the competition is getting more intense.
Now, even if it were bad for our society, it might still make sense for us all, as individuals, to do our utmost to get our children into Oxbridge. But I don’t think it does.
First, those international league tables measure the quality not of the education undergraduates get, but of universities’ research. That’s because you can easily measure research strength — you look at how often the papers produced by their researchers are cited by other researchers — but you can’t properly measure how good they are at teaching. Good researchers aren’t necessarily good teachers, and universities that promote people because of their research are likely to discourage academics from focusing on teaching. Ask students or alumni about the teaching at Oxbridge and you get conflicting reports. For those lucky enough to get a good tutor, the tutorial system, which gives undergraduates two-on-one sessions with top academics, is fantastic; for those whose tutor sits there with an expression of petrified boredom as they read out their essay — as one of mine did — then it’s worse than sitting in a big seminar.
Even if you can’t measure whether students are getting a decent education, you can look at how they get on in life. And by the age of 29, graduates of the London School of Economics do best: hardly surprising, since they all thunder into ridiculously lucrative jobs in the City straight after university. Oxford, Imperial and Cambridge come next. But since most of their students are clever, well off and would probably do well anywhere, those figures don’t tell you whether an institution improved a student’s prospects. More interesting is some research we did at The Economist looking at, among other factors, graduates’ previous exam results, household income and whether they went to private or state school, to try to estimate how universities had done in terms of giving students a leg up. Oxford came 10th and Cambridge 38th. Portsmouth came top, and St Andrews bottom.
But perhaps the most interesting paper on the impact of elite universities on students’ prospects was done in America, by Stacy Dale and the late, great Alan Krueger. They looked at the earnings of 14,000 graduates with similar intellectual abilities, some of whom did and some of whom didn’t go to top universities, to determine what impact the status of their college had on earnings. The answer, for most students, was none. The only group for whom going to Harvard or Yale made a significant difference was ethnic minority students. Why? Probably because the big advantage that a top university gives you is access to a network of successful people. The rich white kids had that anyway.
That’s just money, you may say; and getting a well-paid job is only one of the things which students have in mind when they choose a university. They are looking for lots of other stuff too. I agree. But you can’t measure the other stuff. I have no reason to believe that it is going to be any worse at Portsmouth than at Oxford; and money is pretty important. So in the absence of any other measure, it seems worth looking at. But sure, if you want to be prime minister, Oxbridge is probably a good idea.
Krueger, a brilliant economist dedicated to using the discipline to make the world a better place, and who died this year, pointed to two lessons from his paper. To students, he said: “Don’t believe that the only school worth attending is one that would not admit you . . . Recognise that your own motivation, ambition and talents will determine your success more than the college name on your diploma.” Hysterical mothers would do well to remember that. To universities, he said: “Recognise that the most disadvantaged students benefit most from your instruction. Set financial aid and admission policies accordingly.” Oxbridge would do well to remember that.
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Harvard Study Shows the Dangers of Early School Enrollment
Harvard Study Shows the Dangers of Early School Enrollment
Every parent knows the difference a year makes in the development and maturity of a young child. A one-year-old is barely walking while a two-year-old gleefully sprints away from you. A four-year-old is always moving, always imagining, always asking why, while a five-year-old may start to sit and listen for longer stretches.
Growing Expectations Vs. Human Behavior
Children haven’t changed, but our expectations of their behavior have. In just one generation, children are going to school at younger and younger ages, and are spending more time in school than ever before. They are increasingly required to learn academic content at an early age that may be well above their developmental capability.
In 1998, 31 percent of teachers expected children to learn to read in kindergarten. In 2010, 80 percent of teachers expected this. Now, children are expected to read in kindergarten and to become proficient readers soon after, despite research showing that pushing early literacy can do more harm than good.
In their report Reading in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose education professor Nancy Carlsson-Paige and her colleagues warn about the hazards of early reading instruction. They write,
When children have educational experiences that are not geared to their developmental level or in tune with their learning needs and cultures, it can cause them great harm, including feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and confusion.
Hate The Player, Love The Game
Instead of recognizing that schooling is the problem, we blame the kids. Today, children who are not reading by a contrived endpoint are regularly labeled with a reading delay and prescribed various interventions to help them catch up to the pack. In school, all must be the same. If they are not listening to the teacher, and are spending too much time daydreaming or squirming in their seats, young children often earn an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) label and, with striking frequency, are administered potent psychotropic medications.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that approximately 11 percent of children ages four to seventeen have been diagnosed with ADHD, and that number increased 42 percent from 2003-2004 to 2011-2012, with a majority of those diagnosed placed on medication. Perhaps more troubling, one-third of these diagnoses occur in children under age six.
It should be no surprise that as we place young children in artificial learning environments, separated from their family for long lengths of time, and expect them to comply with a standardized, test-driven curriculum, it will be too much for many of them.
New findings by Harvard Medical School researchers confirm that it’s not the children who are failing, it’s the schools we place them in too early. These researchers discovered that children who start school as among the youngest in their grade have a much greater likelihood of getting an ADHD diagnosis than older children in their grade. In fact, for the U.S. states studied with a September 1st enrollment cut-off date, children born in August were 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than their older peers.
The study’s lead researcher at Harvard, Timothy Layton, concludes: “Our findings suggest the possibility that large numbers of kids are being overdiagnosed and overtreated for ADHD because they happen to be relatively immature compared to their older classmates in the early years of elementary school.”
This Should Come As No Surprise
Parents don’t need Harvard researchers to tell them that a child who just turned five is quite different developmentally from a child who is about to turn six. Instead, parents need to be empowered to challenge government schooling motives and mandates, and to opt-out.
As universal government preschool programs gain traction, delaying schooling or opting out entirely can be increasingly difficult for parents. Iowa, for example, recently lowered its compulsory schooling age to four-year-olds enrolled in a government preschool program.
As New York City expands its universal pre-K program to all of the city’s three-year-olds, will compulsory schooling laws for preschoolers follow? On Monday, the New York City Department of Education issued a white paper detailing a “birth-to-five system of early care and education,” granting more power to government officials to direct early childhood learning and development.
As schooling becomes more rigid and consumes more of childhood, it is causing increasing harm to children. Many of them are unable to meet unrealistic academic and behavioral expectations at such a young age, and they are being labeled with and medicated for delays and disorders that often only exist within a schooled context. Parents should push back against this alarming trend by holding onto their kids longer or opting out of forced schooling altogether.
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