We knew who we were when we went to school. Our curriculum was developed with a clear education philosophy and the clear purpose of allowing us to develop our potential with the freedom to think for ourselves and to think critically.
We had our families and our communities. We had boy scouts and rugby. There was God and we aspired to live good Christian values even if we didn’t quite accept the supernatural. We were a free nation that our Dads and Uncles had fought and died to defend. We were a part of the commonwealth of countries. We were proud of our history and heritage.
We were taught character. To be honest and to be brave. Indeed, character came before talent and skills. Our schools and our organisations reinforced the need to be a good person.
Was it perfect? Of course not. Were there problems? Of course.
But we knew who we were. We knew what we were a part of. We knew that standards of behaviour were necessary and that these standards were not decided by us but were set perhaps divinely or certainly over generations and embedded in the civilising institutions of which we were a part
We weren’t taught, “It’s all OK. You do you.” We were taught and held to universal standards of behaviour.
It is completely different now. We are properly outraged that young children are taught that they could be born in the wrong body. That they could be a girl, not a boy, or something else entirely. We are properly appalled by the prescribing of puberty blockers as per government policy and the surgical sterilisation of children through the sick ritualistic abuse by adults believing they are God able to take a little boy and make a little girl.
That’s sick and horrific. It’s no less sick and horrific that our political leaders and health system all support the abuse. All so-called gender affirming care should be forthwith stopped and those involved prosecuted for the damage and abuse to young lives.
But sterilising children is only the extreme edge of the horror. There is a deep and comprehensive horror in our schools affecting each and every child of which parents and politicians and, indeed, teachers are blithely unaware.
Our children are having their identity disrupted. It’s deliberate and systematic. It starts at preschool with each child having to develop their “pepeha” which means to identify their mountain and river as a way of explaining who they are. I am sure all our top public civil servants have their pepeha just like our pre schoolers. Pantheism is the state religion. For little children, identifying with a mountain is confusing and discombobulating. They correctly don’t see themselves in that way. And yet they must constantly do so in reciting their pepeha.
It’s easy to dismiss as harmless but it isn’t and it doesn’t stop there. The schools proceed to implement a hyperfocus on race and ethnicity and sex and gender. Children at Primary School know their mountain and their river. And they know they are white and pakeha and therefore bad and sorry and somehow less than if only they were brown. And the children too are taught to question their sex and sexual identity and that literally they would be “awesome“ to be some ther identity and brave to say so. Children who are “brave” and “awesome” become special and privileged.
It carries on and intensifies through High School. The focus on race, sex and gender is at the expense of developing humanity, character and faithAnd there you have a key difference of what school was back in the day to what it is now.
The result is “anxiety, rigidity, depression, and, in extreme cases, a fragmented sense of self”.
Psychologist Dr Stephen Stosny has brilliantly summarised what is happening.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/nz/blog/anger-in-the-age-of-entitlement/202306/identity-resilience
I have had the great pleasure and insight of interviewing the wonderful Elisabeth Cave who has studied how schools are disrupting identity.
An identity is built on a base of a shared humanity, of character and belief. That no longer happens. The focus is on the top of the identity pyramid with gender, sex, race and identity.
It’s why our kids are lost. They literally don’t know who they are. It’s left to them to identify and define themselves. They are not introduced to their heritage or history. They need to decide their mountain and river and whether they are a boy or a girl. It is only their race that is immutable: the most inconsequential characteristic of them all. Everything else is up to them.
Our kids are left lost and anxious.
The situation is dire as Elisabeth makes plain.
There’s no immediate fix. The shift has been surreptitious. Politicians are unaware. And teachers themselves are indoctrinated to the now status quo. But some understanding of the problem of what is wrong is the start of the defence.
Schools are toxic to humanity, character and faith. It is now entirely up to families to instil humanity, character and belief, and to reinforce the home with clubs, sports and church because our schools are inimical to the development of well rounded, confident graduates of good character. And it’s not a fault. It’s a design.
What we are witnessing has been decades in the making.
We have allowed family, church and other civilising institutions to be stripped away. The only justifiable collective now is the state. There is the individual. And the state. There is nothing now mediating between the two. And now even our individuality — our very concept of who we are — is being stripped away.
We are increasingly subject to state decree, and reliant on the state, and comfortable in being so, fearful of a life absent a big bloated overbearing government.
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