Swedish educators have targeted children for cross-gender conditioning. Beginning at ages 1 and 2, girls are taught to act like boys and boys are taught to act like girls. Parents and teachers worked hard to make sure a 3-year-old boy wearing a dress was never taught not to do so, and teachers celebrated a 2-year-old girl who learned to yell and get dirty. The leader of this movement even admitted it was “indoctrination,” a kind of conditioning about which C.S. Lewis presciently warned.
“We tried to do that — to educate boys in what girls already knew, and vice versa,” Ingemar Gens, a journalist who dabbled in anthropology and gender theory and started the cross-gender education movement in Sweden, told The New York Times. Critics “said we were indoctrinating the kids. I say we’re always indoctrinating kids. Bringing them up is indoctrination.”
This kind of “indoctrination” would make almost any traditional parent’s jaw drop. The New York Times‘s Ellen Barry got right to the punch: “Something was wrong with the Penguins, the incoming class of toddlers at the Seafarer’s Preschool,” Barry wrote. What was wrong?
“The boys were clamorous and physical. They shouted and hit. The girls held up their arms and whimpered to be picked up. The group of 1- and 2-year-olds had, in other words, split along traditional gender lines. And at this school, that is not O.K.,” the Times writer explained.
The teachers intervened. They “cleared the room of cars and dolls. They put the boys in charge of the play kitchen. They made the girls practice shouting ‘No!’ Then they decided to open a proper investigation, erecting video cameras in the classroom.”
In other words, the Swedish teachers actively decided to force girls to adopt masculine behavior and boys to adopt feminine behavior, contrary to their natural inclinations or societal norms.
Barry went on to describe Otto, “a sturdy 3-year-old,” who was wearing a dress. “Otto prefers to wear dresses because he likes the way they fan out when he spins around, and it does not make him unusual here.”
“Up until now, no one in Otto’s life — not his grandparents, or babysitters, or fellow 3-year-olds — has told him that boys do not wear dresses, said his mother, Lena Christiansson, 36, matter-of-factly. She would like this to continue as long as possible,” Barry explained, as if this were perfectly natural.
More terrifying, however, the teachers conditioned a 2-year-old girl to act more aggressive and masculine, creating problems for her parents, who did not appreciate the change.
The parents “dropped her off wearing tights and pale-pink dresses. The girl focused intently on staying clean. If another child took her toys, she would whimper,” Barry wrote. A 26-year-old teacher, Izabell Sandberg, said, “I thought this was very girlie.”
After some good new-fashioned conditioning, the girl became more aggressive. “By the time March rolled around, the girl had gotten so loud that she drowned out the boys in the class, Ms. Sandberg said. At the end of the day, she was messy. The girl’s parents were less than delighted, she said, and reported that she had become cheeky and defiant at home.”
How did Sandberg respond to this news? “This is what we do here, and we are not going to stop it.”
But Ms. Sandberg has plenty of experience explaining the mission to parents.
“This is what we do here, and we are not going to stop it,” she said.
In a positively Orwellian twist, this reconditioning even extended to the teachers themselves.
Helena Baggstrom, who taught at one of the schools, recalled watching footage of herself in a cloakroom, attending to children as they bundled up to go outside. She saw, to her shock, that she had helped one boy after another get dressed and run out the door. The girls, she realized, were expected to dress themselves.
“It was hard at first to see patterns,” she said. “We saw more and more, and we were horrified at what we saw.”
Teachers now have to watch themselves, lest they commit a crime against new-think and actually treat boys and girls differently.
The indoctrination pushes people apart, and leads the new post-gender elites to judge the rubes who still dress babies in gender-specific clothing.
A 26-year-old woman, Elin Gerdin, was among the first wave to be taught the cross-gender indoctrination. The Times reported that “Gerdin’s friends have begun to have babies, and they post pictures of them on Facebook, swathed in blue or pink, in society’s first act of sorting.”
“Ms. Gerdin gets upset when this happens. She feels sorry for the children. She makes it a point to seek her friends out and tell them, earnestly, that they are making a mistake,” Barry reported.
God forbid parents dress their children however they’d like! Some have noted the denial of parental rights in this situation, but the fundamental problem runs much deeper.
In his podcast “The Briefing,” Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, accepted that the post-gender conditioning was “indoctrination” and said that “parents are the first indoctrinators of their children.” He said this is “right” and “the responsibility and the right and privilege of parents.”
Both the anti-gender indoctrinator Gens and the pro-parent Mohler are tragically wrong on this score, however.
In his book “The Abolition of Man,” English author C.S. Lewis explained the difference between traditional wholistic moral education and modern indoctrination. The traditional system relies on the idea that children ought to be brought up to recognize objective morality, while the modern system attempts to foist a new morality upon them.
“In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by [conscience] — a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart,” Lewis explained. “They did not cut men to some pattern they have chosen,” but rather “they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike.” It was merely “old birds teaching young birds to fly.”
The newer system, by contrast, regards morality as flexible and unnatural. According to this understanding, “judgements of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning.” The new teachers — whom Lewis called the Conditioners — “know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce.”
Modern education, Lewis warned, aims to produce “Men without Chests,” by which he meant men and women with a deformed understanding of morality. Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine argued that the goal of education was to grow a young person’s conscience, so his moral understanding conformed to reality.
“The little human animal will not at first have the right responses,” Lewis explains. “It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.” The desires and passions of the gut must be mastered by the reason and knowledge of the head. Classical education sought to improve the heart — the sentiments and passions that bring appetite into conformity with right reason.
“The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment — these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.” Lewis even claime this spirited element may be what makes us truly human — “for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”
Modern education, by contrast, teaches the young to debunk morality and follow their own course. It produces what may be called “Men without Chests,” men and women without the grounding in right response to the reality that makes it possible to live a good life.
Ironically, even though the conditioners are attempting to mold children into their own image with their own morality, the children are still human and the same old natural morality and understanding breaks through. The Swedish conditioners have to force the little boys and little girls to reject masculine and feminine actions, going against the grain.
This very difficulty suggests that this conditioning is unnatural. Men and women — boys and girls — have different traits based in genetics and biology, as well as the societal teaching that blue is for boys and pink is for girls (about 100 years ago, these colors were actually reversed).
Male aggression and female emotional intelligence may not be universal, but there is reason to believe these “stereotypes” are more than just societal.
Rather than attempting to launch a war over which conditioning schools should foist upon children, both liberals and conservatives should humble themselves and realize that education is about forming a child into a full human being — a process of initiation and learning to think for himself or herself, rather than conditioning and indoctrination. After all, education means “to lead out of darkness,” not to teach rote ideas.
This kind of post-gender conditioning is indeed a threat far outside Sweden. A Minnesota school has vowed that it will not even notify parents before celebrating a child’s transgender identity — in kindergarten! A Planned Parenthood affiliate has demanded a transgender Disney princess. Ohio parents lost custody of their teenager because they refused to confirm her transgender identity.
Americans need to speak out against this conditioning, or their own little boys will come home in dresses and their own little girls will become “cheeky and defiant at home.”
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