According to administrators at Chicago Public Schools (CPS), children as young as five years old should be receiving sex education. This year, mandatory sexual and health education have been added to the kindergarten curriculum.
CBS local news reports, “CPS insists the curriculum will use language children understand and focus on topics like bullying, correct names for external body parts and the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching.”
The new policy calls for 300 minutes of instruction, amounting to approximately 30 minutes per month.
Stephanie Whyte, the CPS chief health officer, elaborates, “As you identify body parts, you talk about should you be touched here or not. And if someone touches you, and it’s uncomfortable, you should tell a trusted adult.”
Whyte also states that the curriculum will allow the students to look at different family structures.
“Whether that means there’s two moms at home, everyone’s home life is different, and we introduce the fact that we all have a diverse background,” said Whyte.
Some parents, however, are opposed to such lessons being taught in schools. For instance, parent Brook Lyon told CBS News, “If he [her son] has questions, I’m happy to answer them, but I’m not sure it belongs in a classroom setting.”
Perhaps even more astounding is that the curriculum change dates back to a proposal issued by Barack Obama in 2003 when he served as Illinois state senator. He later defended his position during his 2008 presidential run.
Life News recalls:
At a Planned Parenthood convention at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., on July 17, 2007, a teenage girl who said she worked as a sex-education “peer educator” in the D.C. public schools asked then-U.S. Sen. Obama what he would do to encourage the teaching of “medically accurate, age-appropriate, and responsible sex education.”
In response, then-Senator Obama stated that he worked with Planned Parenthood to advocate a sex education bill during his tenure in the Illinois state legislature.
He then went on to say, “I remember Alan Keyes — I ran against Alan Keyes — but I remember his using this in his campaign against me, saying, ‘Barack Obama supports teaching sex education to kindergartners.’”
“And you know,” Obama continued, “I didn’t know what to tell him. But it is the right thing to do, to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in the schools.”
Speaking directly to the young lady who asked him the question about sex education, he said, “You, as a peer, can have enormous power over your age cohort but you’ve got to have some support from the schools. You certainly should not have to be fighting each and every instance by providing accurate information outside of the classroom because inside the classroom the only thing that can be talked about is abstinence.”
“Keep in mind: I honor and respect young people who choose to delay sexual activity,” Obama continued. “I’ve got two daughters, and I want them to understand that sex is not something casual. That’s something that we definitely want to communicate and should be part of any curriculum. But we also know that when the statistics tell us that nearly half of 15- to 19-year-olds are engaging in sexual activity, that for us to leave them in ignorance is potentially consigning them to illness, pregnancy, poverty, and in some cases, death.”
Chicago schools also appear to be fully aligned with curriculum standards proposed by the United Nations. According to 2010 guidelines set by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in a report entitled “International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education,” “It is never too early to start talking to children about sexual matters.”
According to the report, “Preparing young children and young people for the transition to adulthood has always been one of humanity’s great challenges, with human sexuality and relationships at its core. Today, in a world with AIDS, how we meet this challenge is our most important opportunity in breaking the trajectory of the epidemic.” The report goes on to say that “inadequate preparation leaves [children] vulnerable,” and encourages parents to teach their children about sexuality from birth.
What’s worse is that the 2010 guidelines, as absurd as they seem, were in fact a revision from earlier guidelines introduced the year before that were even more controversial, including those that encouraged abortion and masturbation to be taught to children as young as five.
As a result of the revisions, some of the more explicit language found in the guidelines had been changed, but the majority of the controversial suggestions remain, including a sex-education curriculum for children from birth to age five. One such suggestion encourages parents to buy anatomically-correct dolls and inform their children of diverse sexual relationships.
Likewise, the curriculum encourages parents to be supportive and open-minded to gender identity and sexual orientation, and discourages them from enforcing traditional gender identities: “Confusion about these issues and fear of homosexuality (homophobia) has caused many parents and other adults to limit how girls and boys express themselves.”
Chicago’s curriculum seeks to do just that. It is becoming increasingly clear that some seek to virtually eliminate and replace the role and discretion of the parents.
Besides the obvious reasons for why Chicago schools should avoid teaching sex education to kindergartners, Townhall.com notes that it represents an inexplicable misdirection of priorities:
Is there really no other subject (or subjects) teachers could focus on instead of “sexual and health education”? After all, roughly 80 percent of eighth graders in the city are not “grade-level proficient” in either reading or math. Wouldn’t it therefore be wise for teachers to spend additional time with young children, say, teaching them how to read and solve math problems?
Or perhaps preparing children for high school and college has lost its allure, since little to no jobs await them after they’ve graduated anyway.
Photo: art and craft activity in the kindergarten via Shutterstock
