Schools in the UK may soon say goodbye to traditional terms such as ‘Sir’ or ‘Miss’ and replace them with ‘gender-neutral’ terms such as ‘teacher’. A woke training session funded by the National Education Union (NEU) asks teachers to tell their pupils not to use the abovementioned gendered terms. According to the training, other words that should be off-bounds include ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘son’ and ‘mother.’
The training was conducted by a charity called Educate and Celebrate, which has a mission of promoting LGBT acceptance in schools. The training session was presented by Dr. Elly Barnes, chief executive of the Educate and Celebrate charity. Dr. Barnes, speaking to teachers, stressed the importance of adopting a ‘gender-free model’ in classrooms.
Predictably, this move to push woke agenda on children has invited ridicule and criticism from angry social media users. One user tweeted, “’Dropping genders in school? Whatever next. Go see the headmaster. No go see the head him/they/them.” Also, Founder of the Free Speech Union Toby Young said, “Asking their members to tell children not to call them “Sir” or “Miss” is inappropriate and will make teachers’ lives harder, not easier. We can’t get through a single week without somebody trying to police what language we can use.”
This issue was also discussed on ITV’s This Morning Today. The show’s presenter Dermot O’Leary said, “The pressure is going to be on the kids to try to get their heads round this at an age when they should just be being children and not worry about it.”
Educate and Celebrate, the woke charity that conducted the training session, has this written on their website: “We provide LGBT+ inclusion training to ensure that you meet all of your Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) objectives for staff, support staff, leadership teams, governors, trainee teachers, student workshops, youth networks, CPD days and an Award Programme.” The charity received funding from the Department of Education in the past.
Dr. Barnes, who conducted the webinar that was titled ‘Getting the language right for 2022’, also went on to offer other ‘woke’ suggestions. One is the proposal to remove the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ from school application forms. She went a step further in another suggestion, asking school uniforms to be gender-neutral (not sure whether it involves girls wearing trousers or boys wearing skirts).
Dr. Barnes probably had her most bizarre training session at Trent College in 2019, where she asked her attendees to chant the phrase ‘smash heteronormativity.’ For those who are unable to keep up with ever-expanding woke terms, heteronormativity is the idea that heterosexuality is the normal sexual orientation.These training sessions follow a pattern of woke indoctrination in schools in the UK and US. While Educate and Celebrate’s training is for teachers, there are many examples of schools coaching children on transgender ideology, often without the knowledge of their parents.
