An elite New York prep school that costs $47,000 per year to attend used a health and sexuality workshop for juniors to feature instruction in “Pornography literacy: An intersectional focus on mainstream porn” without informing parents or getting their consent.
Aside from the subject matter, “intersectionality” is a primary element of critical race theory and seeks to connect race, class, gender, and other “identities” to explain discrimination and privilege.
The question isn’t should 17-year-old kids be exposed to porn. They already are every day and have easy access to it. The question is why, if it’s so healthy, parents of students at the elite Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School weren’t informed or allowed to opt out of the workshop?
The often-explicit slide presentation and lecture by Fonte to the 120 boys and girls included lessons on how porn takes care of “three big male vulnerabilities”; statistics on the “orgasm gap” showing straight women have far fewer orgasms with their partners than gay men or women; and photos of partially-nude women, some in bondage, to analyze “what is porn and what is art.”
“We were all like, ‘What?’” a female student said. “Everyone was texting each other, ‘What the hell is this? It’s so stupid.’ Everyone knows about porn. The worst part of it was that it took place not long before the AP tests and I had to miss both my AP classes for this.”
Now there’s a kid with her head on straight. And the rest of the kids weren’t much more thrilled at what they saw as a waste of time.
“We were all so shocked and mortified,” the girl told The Post. “We were all like, ‘Why are they doing this? Why do they think it’s OK?’
“We were supposed to answer questions about the porn stuff in the Zoom chat but we were all side-chatting in group chats and tons of kids thought it was so dumb that they sent the link to their friends all over the city and they were all logging on with the password.”
As for the parents, they were worried if they spoke up, they’d be canceled.
“No one wants to be canceled or lose their livelihood and that can be done in an instant,” the mother said. “Most parents feel the same way I do about not going public but at the same time we’re incredibly frustrated by what’s going on. None of the parents knew this was planned. We were completely left in the dark. It makes us wonder what else the school is up to.”
The teacher of the workshop was on loan from Dalton School, another elite academy in the city (it costs more than $55,000 per year per student). Parents there say that the teacher, Justine Ang Fonte, was teaching inappropriate subject matter to small children.
A spokesman for Dalton, where parents have told The Post that Fonte teaches classes to first and second graders that include inappropriate discussions of sexuality, possibly about masturbation, defended Fonte’s work.
Fonte fancies herself something of a revolutionary.
Fonte’s website says she has “reveled in disrupting health education for 10 years” and frames her “pedagogy through the lens of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s teachings on intersectionality.”
Crenshaw, 62, is a law professor at Columbia University and the UCLA School of Law and an early proponent of critical race theory who coined the word “intersectionality” more than 30 years ago. It refers to how people’s social identities overlap and how some are disadvantaged by their race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation or religion.
It’s significant that parents are terrified of speaking up lest they get canceled. The children feel the pressure too. It makes you wonder; If critical race theory and porn literacy are so important to the development of children, why do they feel necessary in hiding their teachings from parents?
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