Obvious ending, and yet never a bad time for Pet Shop Boys, ha.
I'm not sure how well your case fits Ms Leger's situation though, or the philosophical conundrum of teaching about LGBT stuff against your will. First, the school's name and your comment about the confession of her school lead me to believe that it was a religious school. If so, first I'm surprised they would put this into the curriculum, but second, in those environments, the school typically has a mission to promote its faith, and the faculty are indeed charged with that. So it seems to me that in this scenario, she was within her right to throw the ideology under the bus, even define the behavior as sin. You might need to refresh me, I know Brits and Americans use "private/public" differently, so let's say, "in a government-paid school open to anyone to attend," it should come from a secular angle. I still have a problem with this inclusion in the curriculum, but it at least makes more sense, they have more of a case. In the "religious background school that parents pay directly to enroll their children in," I would think they have more control and every right to get into this spat.
But the third, and to me more important angle, is the qualitative difference between LGBT activism as a topic vs. your holocaust example. The holocaust was a single event in the past that can be looked at from afar, and its participants viewed as "other;" LGBT material is almost impossible to separate from an *invitation* to participate. It involves direct questioning of the self and identity and opens up kids' minds to questions they might never have had. Yeah, the purpose on the label is to free up and defend the 1-2 kids who thought they might be weird or knew it and hid it, but it also invites like 10-12 other kids to social contagion through subliminal suggestion, and *that's* the part I take the biggest issue with.
When you teach kids about the holocaust, it is never glorified, and none of the kids wonder if they're secretly a Nazi, because right off the bat, they aren't German (except in Deutschland, obv), the Nazi party doesn't exist anymore, and it isn't the 1930s. It's so distant, no child ever accidentally falls into white supremacy from a holocaust lesson, they can't relate. Not to say they couldn't become white supremacist through some other means, knowledge, experience etc. but it probably wouldn't look appealing through this curriculum. The maternal longhouse approach of LGBT curriculum is what makes it so dangerous.
My "case" is not a case. It's a series of responses that are not entirely mutually coherent. They're "sound bites". For example, I chop and change between defending her view that it's a sin, saying something else is a sin and asking who's she to say what a sin is? There's coherence somewhere in that incoherence.
If you click through to the Pink News article, you get more context. She is quoted there as saying, "I cannot, however, in good conscience teach or say things I believe are contrary to my faith." That is quite simply nonsense. You can teach anything that is contrary to your faith. All you do is say, "Some people believe ..." You don't need to say "It's good" or "It's bad". What you should be saying as a teacher to 13-year-olds is "There is a big world out there, with lots of people in it who have a different view to your own. Here are some of the views that they have, and it is recommended that you become familiar with them so as to allow the world to live in peace after you grow up."
The Holocaust (the piece was written before the current Gaza emergency) is an interesting parallel, and I don't dismiss it as easily as you might want to. My parents spent their teenage years in wartime. When they visited me in Germany, I could see that they had some difficulty in relating to the people they met - like restaurant waiters and even my friends. On one view, these young people's fathers and mothers precipitated a war that robbed my folks of their youth. The previous war robbed my great-uncle not only of his youth but also of his life.
A colleague at work told me, "You must realise the huge burden of shame that I and my generation grew up bearing on our shoulders. We were born post-war, but the war was a thing that almost made us ashamed to look foreigners in the eye. Our task as the new German youth was to do so much better than our fathers had. That task was ever-present in our minds, for 40 years and more."
So, would a lover of German language ever baulk at teaching it because of the Holocaust? Well, look at Henry Kissinger. He softened the "g" in his last name, to make it look less German. He wanted nothing to do with the country he had to flee from. And there are ex-German Jews who refused to speak "that" language. The same fate will befall some Russian-speakers in Ukraine, perhaps. Language is politics, in Belgium, and many other places. Anti-Hispanic sentiment in the US is expressed as "Speak 'Merican!", which one wants to correct to "English", so that one feels like the foreigner Juror 11 correcting the American Juror 3's English in 12 Angry Men.
Whether the Holocaust was a single event ... that's an interesting proposition. I need to think about that.
Obvious ending, and yet never a bad time for Pet Shop Boys, ha.
I'm not sure how well your case fits Ms Leger's situation though, or the philosophical conundrum of teaching about LGBT stuff against your will. First, the school's name and your comment about the confession of her school lead me to believe that it was a religious school. If so, first I'm surprised they would put this into the curriculum, but second, in those environments, the school typically has a mission to promote its faith, and the faculty are indeed charged with that. So it seems to me that in this scenario, she was within her right to throw the ideology under the bus, even define the behavior as sin. You might need to refresh me, I know Brits and Americans use "private/public" differently, so let's say, "in a government-paid school open to anyone to attend," it should come from a secular angle. I still have a problem with this inclusion in the curriculum, but it at least makes more sense, they have more of a case. In the "religious background school that parents pay directly to enroll their children in," I would think they have more control and every right to get into this spat.
But the third, and to me more important angle, is the qualitative difference between LGBT activism as a topic vs. your holocaust example. The holocaust was a single event in the past that can be looked at from afar, and its participants viewed as "other;" LGBT material is almost impossible to separate from an *invitation* to participate. It involves direct questioning of the self and identity and opens up kids' minds to questions they might never have had. Yeah, the purpose on the label is to free up and defend the 1-2 kids who thought they might be weird or knew it and hid it, but it also invites like 10-12 other kids to social contagion through subliminal suggestion, and *that's* the part I take the biggest issue with.
When you teach kids about the holocaust, it is never glorified, and none of the kids wonder if they're secretly a Nazi, because right off the bat, they aren't German (except in Deutschland, obv), the Nazi party doesn't exist anymore, and it isn't the 1930s. It's so distant, no child ever accidentally falls into white supremacy from a holocaust lesson, they can't relate. Not to say they couldn't become white supremacist through some other means, knowledge, experience etc. but it probably wouldn't look appealing through this curriculum. The maternal longhouse approach of LGBT curriculum is what makes it so dangerous.
My "case" is not a case. It's a series of responses that are not entirely mutually coherent. They're "sound bites". For example, I chop and change between defending her view that it's a sin, saying something else is a sin and asking who's she to say what a sin is? There's coherence somewhere in that incoherence.
If you click through to the Pink News article, you get more context. She is quoted there as saying, "I cannot, however, in good conscience teach or say things I believe are contrary to my faith." That is quite simply nonsense. You can teach anything that is contrary to your faith. All you do is say, "Some people believe ..." You don't need to say "It's good" or "It's bad". What you should be saying as a teacher to 13-year-olds is "There is a big world out there, with lots of people in it who have a different view to your own. Here are some of the views that they have, and it is recommended that you become familiar with them so as to allow the world to live in peace after you grow up."
The Holocaust (the piece was written before the current Gaza emergency) is an interesting parallel, and I don't dismiss it as easily as you might want to. My parents spent their teenage years in wartime. When they visited me in Germany, I could see that they had some difficulty in relating to the people they met - like restaurant waiters and even my friends. On one view, these young people's fathers and mothers precipitated a war that robbed my folks of their youth. The previous war robbed my great-uncle not only of his youth but also of his life.
A colleague at work told me, "You must realise the huge burden of shame that I and my generation grew up bearing on our shoulders. We were born post-war, but the war was a thing that almost made us ashamed to look foreigners in the eye. Our task as the new German youth was to do so much better than our fathers had. That task was ever-present in our minds, for 40 years and more."
So, would a lover of German language ever baulk at teaching it because of the Holocaust? Well, look at Henry Kissinger. He softened the "g" in his last name, to make it look less German. He wanted nothing to do with the country he had to flee from. And there are ex-German Jews who refused to speak "that" language. The same fate will befall some Russian-speakers in Ukraine, perhaps. Language is politics, in Belgium, and many other places. Anti-Hispanic sentiment in the US is expressed as "Speak 'Merican!", which one wants to correct to "English", so that one feels like the foreigner Juror 11 correcting the American Juror 3's English in 12 Angry Men.
Whether the Holocaust was a single event ... that's an interesting proposition. I need to think about that.
"The Nazi party doesn't exist." It does, I can assure you. Its substance does. Even if its form doesn't. And that's my segue to a piece you helped inspire: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/substance-over-form