As if on cue, the state of Washington has announced plans to require LGBTQ history to be taught in all public schools by 2025. This is the intentional indoctrination of American students and will be achieved through the diminishment and removal of standards and courses that are far more integral to intellectual and academic development than the history of sexual preferences and gender identities.
The stated goal is to "promote inclusive learning standards and instructional materials in public schools" and the law requires that among the learning standards developed by the state, LGBTQ history must be included by 2025.
The learning model, the law reads, "must require that the school board of directors, within available materials, adopt inclusive curricula and select diverse, equitable, inclusive, age-appropriate instructional materials that include histories, contributions, and perspectives of historically marginalized and underrepresented groups, including but not limited to, people from various racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, LGBTQ people, and people with various socioeconomic and immigration backgrounds."
And it's not just that the curriculum must address those things, but that the selection of the curriculum itself must use inclusive practices. "The model must require that, in adopting curricula and selecting instructional materials," it reads, "school boards must seek curricula and instructional materials that are as culturally and experientially diverse as possible, recognizing that the availability of materials that include the histories, contributions, and perspectives of historically marginalized and underrepresented groups may vary."
While the Democrats who pushed this through in Washington State likely feel that they are doing the right and compassionate thing by making sure that students in the state are super comfy with men showering in women's gym locker rooms, or with their friends suddenly deciding to remove their breasts to appear male, many parents know that the damage done by useless education is far more dangerous than simply bad ideas.
Bad ideas can be countered—must be countered, and parents must be paying attention—but useless education is damaging and lasting. When ideology is given precedence over skill and competence, over learning basics like how to read, how to properly write and form letters, how to understand cultural context and history, children emerge from school without actually knowing anything.
To be clear, it is not just that these ideas are being added, other ideas are being taken away. When the history of LGBTQ persons and activism takes center stage, the core history of America's founding, of literature, could be minimized or removed entirely. This is what is happening—the history of marginalized groups is replacing teaching on the foundational history of our nation. In so doing, it is a kind of erasure. Students will not have a basic understanding of national culture, instead they will know about the history of legalizing gay marriage, about Harvey Milk, and gender euphoria.
These kids will know how to properly conjugate pronouns for trans non-binary demi-boys who identify as owls, but will they know how to build knowledge? Will they have the tools they need to learn on their own? Will they know how to study, how to investigate, invent, research, make decisions, and live as successful adults in these United States? If we have learned anything from the recent pandemic-inspired school closures, lockdowns, and remote learning, it's that children deprived of proper education fail both in school and in life. They become despondent, lonely, feel like they have no value, and they can't even tell you why.
Mathematics? English? History? Music? Art? Wood shop? Home ec? Not important to those who press on with the absurdity of diversity, equity, inclusion, who rattle on about how important it is to teach children to be anti-racist or that they can swap genders. They don't care if students are competent, have skills, or learn to function in society, they only care about instilling what is essentially a religious belief system that prioritizes everything except excellence, merit, and competence.
It doesn't matter to these leftist ideologues that their last round of bad ideas—shutting the schools and sending kids home to learn on computers—went so badly that huge numbers of American students, products of the public education system, can barely read, can barely do math, are overweight, lonely, don't know how to communicate, can't fathom of future. It doesn't matter to them that these children are suffering, that they lost years of education and socialization, that these kids are struggling to catch up even with parents working hard to help get them back on track.
And still, despite the rancorous outcry against these kinds of programs, the Democrats, progressives, activists, leftists, establishment hacks push forward, raking up our sons and daughters and dragging them along into a perverse future. Parents speak out over and over again, teachers often join in their voices to scream that kids need a proper education, the kind that provides tools and teaches students how to use them, the kind that makes children able to take on national leadership when their time comes.
But again and again, by both parties, by legislators, media, educators, institutions, parents and students are ignored, left to fend for themselves on a barren educational landscape, or simply end up capitulating to curriculum that entraps children in a lifetime of failure.
Washington State is just one of many bodies that will leave children to wither while making themselves feel better about their ideological virtue. By the time this failure becomes apparent, it will be too late for these students, or their parents, to repair the damage done.
