Confusing teens about their gender: the radical new French high school curriculum
Image via WikipediaAs of next September, the new official French science curriculum will require all 11th grade students preparing the Baccalaureate – a majority of French teenagers – to study a number of themes more closely related to gender ideology and aggressive sex education than to nature studies.
Two main headings, “Feminine-Masculine” and “Taking charge of your sexual life together and responsibly,” make up about a third of the yearly curriculum for non-science students; they are also included in a wider program for science candidates. The program shamelessly promotes contraception, justifies abortion and defends homosexual activity.
It also minimizes differences between men and women: “Anatomic and physiological differences, caused by the influence of sexual hormones, between the masculine and the feminine brain are no more important than differences between individuals of the same sex,” is one of the “concepts” 11th graders will be expected to have understood by the time they pass public examinations.
The spirit of the curriculum is abundantly reflected in new textbooks which will be financed by public spending and distributed to pupils in all public, but also in all publicly-funded private schools – mostly Catholic – when the new school year begins.
A range of books edited by all the major textbook publishers has already been offered to school directors nationwide for them to make their choice, but none is morally acceptable: they vary from scandalous to deeply scandalous.
Appalled school directors are discovering how publishers have expanded without question on gender ideology in whole chapters bearing titles like “Becoming a man or a woman”..
The message is clear: “Sexual identity” is one thing. It’s the sex socially assigned at birth - with all its “stereotypes” - according to the “biological sex.” Culture and education are shown to play a major role in this “sex assignation.” “Sexual orientation” is another thing: it is strictly “intimate” and relative to the “private sphere.” It is presented as an affair of free choice.
Most textbooks illustrate these notions with photos of androgynous teenagers and Gay Pride parades.
The idea seems to be to confuse youngsters about their identity as young men and women. Texts and pictures in all the text books dwell on the similarity between the male and the female fetus before “sexual differentiation.” They also lay heavy emphasis on rare chromosomal aberrations that produce undetermined individuals – hermaphrodites – or men with XX chromosomes and women with XY chromosomes.
On the “cultural” side, examples are given of traditional societies that have invented a “third gender,” like the Polynesian “fa’afafine,” who are born male but brought up as females and who can live with a woman or with a man without ever being considered as homosexuals.
The aim of the curriculum is all too clear; it is largely underscored by frequent references to anti-hate crime laws and public organizations fighting against discrimination and “homophobia.”
On the “sex-ed” side, the curriculum and its textbooks have another objectionable purpose: to show how human beings have “mastered” procreation and should master it, be it to avoid the birth of a new human being while having pleasurable sex or be it to overcome infertility by artificial techniques.
Students will be expected to explain that the procreative act has evolved from a hormone-based instinct as seen in rats or sheep to a recreational and culturally enhanced activity as observed among primates. Mating Bonobo apes (or pygmy chimpanzees as they were previously called) are shown to act much like humans: they have relations for fun and for bonding and homosexual acts are frequent, read the textbooks. Human sexuality is portrayed as a variant on this theme: a little more complex, possibly inhibited, but no more than an animal behavior.
Chapters on condoms (“the only” way to avoid sexual infections), “100%” effective contraceptive pills, freely available morning-after pills and all types of abortion complete the picture. Pregnancy is falsely said to begin with the embryo’s implantation in the womb’s lining. Post-abortion trauma and serious side effects of “daily” hormonal contraceptives aren’t even mentioned.
Test-tube fertilization, embryo-freezing and egg donation are made to appear as completely normal – one textbook takes pains to show that only the Catholic Church objects to all artificial procreation. All other types of moral judgment are totally absent.
Some Catholic school directors are now hoping for a wide and strong reaction from the Church; experience shows, however, that publicly-funded private schools tend to keep a low profile on these issues.
Independent Catholic schools, which are paid for exclusively by parents, are facing another problem: although they are not obliged to follow the public curriculum, they do prepare their high-school pupils for the Baccalaureate which opens the way to universities and higher education. For those pupils who pass a science exam at the end of their 11th grade year, the difficulty will be not to expose them either to being untrue to their own conscience, or to bad marks and ideological probing on the part of examiners.
The new curriculum has been developed and gradually implemented since January 2009, when Nicolas Sarkozy’s education minister at the time, Xavier Darcos, made public a “reform” of the “lycée” or French high school.
