Swedish Schools to Ditch Ancient History in Favor of Gender Roles
A controversial new proposal might see Swedish state schools dropping history classes from the national education curriculum to make space for “postmodernism and democratic values”, such as gender roles.
Anna Westerholm, the head of the Swedish National Agency for Education’s curriculum told Svenska Dagbladet on Thursday that the history of ancient civilizations, from prehistoric times to around 1700 AD has been removed from a newly proposed curriculum for Swedish state primary schools. However, there is room for modern history and social sciences, said Westerholm, whose Twitter profile is predictably supported with hashtags such as #Peace #GenderEquality and #Humanitarian.
What I ask you is sustainable, peaceful or humanitarian about cutting the legs from children? In the words of the Jamaican political activist, publisher and orator, Marcus Garvey, “ A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” But flying in the face of any such logic Westerholm, in her infinite wisdom, said “tight class schedules leave no room for it.” There are almost no words to describe this level of narcissism and to think children are exposed to the whims of such hell bent, deluded, politicized adults is shocking.
Westerholm is apparently capable of doing anything in her quest for attention and does not care if she creates generations of dumbed down snowflakes unable to think about or contemplate their origins, but quick to cry and run to a safe-zone if someone dared to misgender them.
And it is clear that while the team of teachers involved in this latest extreme-left exercise seem obsessed with pumping their children with the ills of postmodern identity and gender politics, they completely fail to understand what happens when children are not given data about the origins of things. Only last year The Independent published the shocking news of a new poll in the UK which showed children are confused about the origins of foods, with one in five believing fish fingers are made from chicken and that cheese comes from plants. What is more, 22% of the younger children and 13% of an older group believed pasta comes from animals - see what happens when you stop teaching about the origins of things!
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Children in Sweden will be at the whim of politicized adults deciding the curriculum. (Archivist / Adobe Stock)
The Bent Wisdom of Westerholm
Knowing she would face a wave of hatred and that her selfishness would spark global disgust, Westerholm said that in trying to “squeeze” too much history into the curriculum teachers sometimes miss teaching about the post-war period. Yup - she actually said that, confirming that she has never considered teaching non-linear history where in one class ancient Egyptian history is covered and in the next, maybe WWII or Pre-Colombian South America. Nope - “Just axe the lot” - is the attitude here.
While many would agree that the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the expansion of the Vikings are important episodes in human history, they will be removed altogether from the curriculum in favor of subjects which an article in RT list as: immigration, the environment, climate, “ norm-challenging,” critical theory, “ democratic values,” and gender roles. Teaching a postmodernist view of society and dropping what can be called the classical philosophical tradition the teachers aim to create a “new focus” on western colonialism, nationalism, and the slave trade.
What Exactly Is This Fiasco Anyway?
But is this really Post-Modernism or is it Pseudo-Modernism?
History professor Dick Harrison told Aftonbladet the idea is “ bizarre and baffling,” and literature critic Maria Schottenius called it “ crazy” foretelling that this action would “deprive students” of a connection to their heritage. Even the former Minister of Education, Jan Björklund, Tweeted saying “ the same proposal came when I was a minister, but I stopped it.”
The Jail Bars of Liberation
It is easy to insult the philosophic ideas underpinning post-modernism, but writer and blogger Steve Patterson showed restraint in describing the concept as “ anti-mind". In an article published on Academia and Self-Study, Patterson said postmodernism tries to escape or reject the traditional function of the human mind the postmodernist answer to questions pertaining to “structure” and “rules” in the world are ultimately social or linguistic conventions.
These conventions are interpreted as artificial, arbitrary and oppressive and the task of the postmodernist is not to teach reality, as best we know it based on imperial historical evidence, but to locate, challenge, and destroy artificiality, whether that means freeing men and women from social roles or liberating our minds from the “rules” of conventional thinking.
The prehistoric period will no longer be taught to school children in Sweden (avtk / Adobe Stock)
Logic Must Conquer All
Some advice for concerned parents whose poor children will be exposed to this utter nonsense: when they get home from school gently hold their shoulders and look right into their eyes. Tell them it is okay to enjoy and laugh at books like Harry Potter, and that they are “not” serious representations of reality. Tell them that the universe is not chaotic and contains incalculable amounts of sensible data within its parts. Suggest that the music of Bach is not random, but crafted to sound that way and expresses a mathematical relationship that underlies all and everything in a logically structured universe.
Tell them other peoples beliefs are not as strong as their facts and maybe even: “ A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.
Top image: Student studying artifacts in a museum. Credit: Monkey Business / Adobe Stock
By Ashley Cowie
Comments
i agree totally with everything you said, no matter how many feathers it may ruffle. that is how you conquer people not just by militarilly winning, but taking their identity and culture. it happened here in the USA a couple hundred years ago when European Christians invaded the Americas. look what happened to the idigenous people, turned them into a bunch of alcoholics. as far as sex goes i always thought that was an act of procreation, and gender was the role we played in that act. it did not define who or what type of person we are. it’s all semantics really. if you change these offensive words from male to pan, female to cheese sandwich, and sex becomes grill, in order for me to have children, this pan has to grill my lovely cheese sandwich, that is cooking me dinner in the kitchen. just sayin’
riparianfrstlvr
“ … does not care if she creates generations of dumbed down snowflakes unable to think about or contemplate their origins ...”
Actually, that’s the objective. Extreme leftists in every society always want to erase cultural history otherwise indoctrination and ‘reeducation’ will fail. Tradition, customs, and religion are denigrated and ridiculed, streets, buildings, and landmarks are renamed for the new heroes of the new society, statues are removed and new ones erected. Ideally, no memory of the old society would remain; only the new. The progressive renaming and erasure of Christmas provides just one example. This has been proceeding by increment for a few generations now, enabled by the entertainment industry and the media.
Just in the last generation, the program to stupefy and confuse has increased momentum; children are being told they can choose their ‘gender’, probably because even most children would know they can’t choose their sex. By redefining sex as gender, the idea is created that it’s just an appearance, is a choice, and has nothing to do with biology – a notion that the thousands of storytime drag queens in libraries and schools eagerly reinforce.
Of interest though is the experience in Russia, where in the USSR a concentrated effort was made for 70 years to erase the memory of Russian history and to rewrite it according to the prevailing doctrine while at the same time attempting to remove religion from the consciousness of the people, including the destruction of their places of worship.
The instant the USSR collapsed, objective study of history was revived, as was the Church.
Changes to the social order always seem to inspire backlash – think Elvis and the Beatles and the furor created by people protesting or claiming disaster. However, in this case I must agree with the author, and I think the same sort of thing is happening in U.S., as my inquiries of grandchildren reveals that they have been taught very little in school relative to world or national history.
“When you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”. – from a song, but I don’t know the writer, sorry. In this case, if you don’t know where you’re from, you’ll never know how you got where you are.