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Comment by ponooqjoqo | Hacker News Reader

> pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values

Which values? I haven't gone to school in a long time.

From the Conservative part of my social group, the main one applicable here is pushing elementary school kids to identify as trans. Because young children are very impressionable, and it is forbidden for staff to push back on on it at all, despite the science saying "there is absolutely no such thing as trans before age 12, and much possibility of social trauma from attempting it".

Left-ish people tend to say "this doesn't happen in the real world, it's made up for internet arguments" - and I even said that for a while on this and a few other subjects - but that denial cannot survive extensive contact with the real world.

Why age 12?

Age 12 happens to be the cutoff used in the scientific studies.

And the conclusion to draw from that is that one absolutely cannot be trans under the age of 12?

To avoid arguments about the definition of "be", the clear conclusion is that if it exists it's indistinguishable prior to that age, so any claims before that age can only be considered noise.

It's critical to remember that "reality has a liberal bias" does not mean "literally every detail of things liberals say is reality".

> the clear conclusion is that if it exists it's indistinguishable prior to that age

How is that clear? How would we know if it's indistinguishable if your studies didn't even look?

The whole point is that the studies explicitly did look, and found a negative result.

Name some examples of school systems "pushing" kids to identify as trans. The name of the school and individual teacher, plus the wording that counts as "pushing" would be fine. You say this is happening in the real world, so surely you can point to a few examples.

They use teaching resources like the "Genderbread Person", which pushes the harmful and oppressive social construct of gender in a child-like way, describing women and men in terms of sexist stereotypes rather than sex.

Lots of examples, gender identity and requiring ethnic studies (focusing on white male privilege, settler/colonial, putting groups into binary oppressor/oppressed). Also issues with requiring those classes vs not.

These are two indisputable facts about our world, if you disagree you are wrong and anti-science:

1. Gender is a social construct

2. Whiteness is a social construct and in particular has been used as a bludgeon against minority "non-whites" in the United States for a very long time

If you do not believe these things you are the problem. You lack education. You lack critical thinking. You are brainwashed.

Gender is obvious and unchangeable. Everything else is a mental health issue, and truly sad.

Both of these social constructs must be challenged. The first is used to oppress women and girls primarily, and the second underpins racist oppression.

Of course, I agree. But in the context of education if you reject the above (which MANY people on HN do) then you're delusional. There is nothing nice I have to say about it, and I know how dearly the HN crowd loves to clutch their pearls about the tone. It is akin to believing the world is flat, a broken ideology that should not be entertained.

Once you accept the simple facts as above, then you can finally explore the consequences.

You've identified examples of values, but you have forgotten to link them to the left, forgotten to show if they are controversial and, probably most importantly, forgotten to show how schools are borderline pushing indoctrination of them.

Each of those is well within public knowledge.

In other words, "Trust me, bro!"

Literally nobody forces groups into a good/bad binary more than conservatives. What an embarrassing lack of self awareness

(source: I went to a conservative christian school)

I am very curious too, I’ve asked this to other friends who have mentioned the same thing and the only concrete answer I have got so far was teaching the theory of evolution and climate change.

It's usually evolution or sex or race or something like that.

One of my friends was home schooled. It was at least partly about religious values, but I think it was also partly about him being a bit of a strange kid and getting along better at home. He went back to public schools in middle school, and that was real rough but I think he was happy by the time he got to high school.

I'm sure there are many reasons to home school, but the one I hear about most is religious.

Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:

- Kids are never responsible for anything.

- Teachers are responsible for everything.

That's a parenting problem though, not an education problem, right?

Actually no. The problem comes from society. If you think that kids should be responsible for anything, you are a bad person. If you think that kids should be punished if they do something really bad, you are a monster.

Here we had a case teenagers bullying their teacher – abused her verbally during school, posted deepfake revenge porn into internet, stole stuff from her garden etc. She cried for help and the case was investigated by commission that included people from people from ministry of education, police and psychologists. But the commission concluded that she was the problem – she lacked the skills to build a trusting relationship with kids.

I'm very curious about this as well, GP, please.

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