It’s no secret that the public schools have been degenerating for decades. Back in the 1970s, when I was a wee lad traipsing my way through the education factory I was bored stiff. And when I graduated with my diploma and went off to college I had probably been provided the equivalent of the 6th grade education my father had experienced.

Even at 18, I knew I had been robbed. A college education left me robbed of basic knowledge of history, and for the past decade I have been catching up on things I should have learned in high school.

I am lucky, though, that I graduated when I did. If I had entered school a few decades later I would probably have left the process short some body parts that have turned out to be useful as an adult.

Unfortunately kids in school today aren’t so lucky. They are marinated in an environment that is spiced with every sort of perversion, untruth, and radical ideology that you can conceive.

They would be lucky to leave ignorant of history, instead of having their heads stuffed with historical “facts” and “hermeneutical frameworks” that are destructive of everything that is good, true, and beautiful. Schools have become cesspools.

I have been an avid reader–one could even say fanboy–of two invaluable generals who are leading the good fight in the culture wars: Christopher Rufo and Matt Walsh. Each of them is a clear thinker, passionate leader, and Matt in particular is a spectacular orator. I almost religiously watch his show and you should too.

All this is a prelude to yet another no-longer-shocking story Christopher has in City Journal (another excellent publication!):

NEW: The Michigan Department of Education instructed public school teachers how to facilitate child sexual transitions and recommended that teachers keep a child's "chosen name and pronouns" a secret from parents, even if the child is suicidal.

It's all on video. 🧵

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) September 14, 2022

I am not going to go through all the details because Christopher already has, much better than I could, but I will give you a bit of a preview before you go read the article.

The most important thing is this: the people running the public schools hate parents and want to substitute their judgement for the parents’ when it comes to raising children. Leftists have been saying for decades things like “it takes a village to raise a child,” which sounds anodyne enough, but they are becoming more explicit about the real meaning: children should be raised by the state itself, not by parents or their chosen communities such as churches.

Former MSNBC host Melissa Harris Perry made this clear in her MSNBC promo spot a few years back:

Your kids belong to the community. And by that the Left means the state. Very soviet of them.

Getting back to Rufo’s latest bombshell.

The Michigan Department of Education has adopted a radical gender theory program that promotes gender “fluidity” beginning in elementary school and encourages teachers to facilitate the sexual transition of minors without parental consent.

I have obtained videos and internal documentation from the state’s training program, which first took place in 2020 and was repackaged for public school employees for the 2021–2022 school year. The training program mimics the basic narrative of academic queer theory: the presenters claim that the West has created a false notion that “gender is binary” in order to oppress racial and sexual minorities. In response, the department encourages teachers to adopt the principle of “intersectionality,” a key tenet of critical race theory, in order to “dismantle systems of oppression,” which are replicated through the culture and institutions of education. (In a statement, the Michigan Department of Education defended the program as “respecting all children” and “meet[ing] the needs of their LGBTQ+ students.”)

The first step to dismantling these systems, according to the presenters, is to disrupt the gender binary. In one presentation, trainer Amorie Robinson, who describes herself as a “Black, masculine-identified, cisgendered lesbian baby boomer” and uses the “African name” Kofi Adoma, says that “we’ve been conditioned and we’ve been acculturated in this particular culture that gender is binary.” But teachers should know that, in fact, gender is a spectrum, including identities such as “gender non-binary,” “gender fluid,” “gender queer,” “gender non-conforming,” and “bi-gender.” Likewise, sexual orientation can include an expanding range of categories. Students might identify as “asexual, lesbian, straight, gay, bisexual, queer, questioning, demisexual, demiromantic, aromantic, and skoliosexual,” says Robinson. “I’ll leave that to you to go Google on those. Because we ain’t got time today!”

What the heck is a “scholiosexual?” Oh, forget it, I am pretty sure I don’t want to know.

There is nothing shocking any more about the ideology itself. It is the same perverted and evil cultural/sexual Marxism we have been hearing about and fighting against for the past couple of years or more. What really stands out is how in this training the Department of Education is making starkly clear that they are enlisting teachers into what amounts to a conspiracy to hide what they are teaching kids, and the results of that teaching–even if doing so can lead to kids becoming suicidal.

Finally, the Michigan Department of Education instructs teachers how to facilitate child sexual transitions and recommends that they keep a child's “chosen name and pronouns” a secret from parents, even if the child is suicidal. pic.twitter.com/XtvfaEz6JN

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) September 14, 2022

Yes, they went there: will they be liable if a kid kills herself? Priorities priorities.

As I said I neither can nor should do a full rehash of all the dangerous and evil advice being doled out by the Michigan Department of Education, because you really should read and follow Christopher’s work.

Rufo has made public the documents and videos from the Department of Education training. I have of course ignored along with Rufo their warning that these documents should not be shared. I, for one, am not bound by their demand that their conspiracy remain hidden.

I used to think that public schools were perhaps reparable, but now I seriously doubt it. At a minimum we should fight like hell for educational choice (I do some work with an excellent educational choice advocacy group). But perhaps we should look into ways to completely revamp the way we provide public subsidies to education. Which could mean closing down the current public schools altogether and make all primary and secondary institutions compete with each other for students and hence public funds.

Let the cream rise to the top, and then throw out the yucky skim milk. Who likes skim milk anyway?