Get Ready for Woke Biology:
Current Textbooks Accused of ‘Outdated Ideas’

One after another, the dominoes of traditional education are falling. The failure to teach basic academic skills is an increasingly obvious issue impacting many subjects, including reading, math, civics, history, “health,” and even science. Now, any semblance of teaching factual biology appears to be in jeopardy with the accusation that U.S. biology textbooks contain “misguided assumptions on sex and gender.”

The notion that sex and gender are different concepts has existed in American culture for years, and taught more recently by activist teachers to schoolchildren as young as kindergarten. It’s not surprising, therefore, that textbooks featuring actual biology must of necessity come under fire for failure to reflect these myths.

How Government Schools are Raising Activists

In his excellent book, The Marxification of Education — reviewed in Education Reporter last November— author and mathematician James Lindsay, Ph.D exposes Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire’s considerable influence on American education during the past 40 years. While Freire died in 1997, his destructive pedagogy is alive and well today in classrooms across the nation, essentially holding that the role of an educator is to teach students to become dutiful Marxist revolutionaries.

One example of this philosophy in practice recently came to light in a post on X by parent Ramona Bessinger, which exposes the K-12 “Wit and Wisdom” curriculum in North Kingstown, Rhode Island’s 8th-grade English Language Arts (ELA) class. Purportedly available nationwide, Bessinger cautions that it may be known by different names in different areas of the country.

Legal Recourse for Saving Kids

Calling the school’s policy “a trifecta of harm,” a judge with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California ruled last September that the Escondido Union School District could not force two longtime teachers, Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, to violate their religious beliefs by lying to parents about their students’ gender dysphoria. The teachers were placed on leave for defying the school district’s policy of requiring them to hide students’ gender questioning from parents, and the ruling included an order for their reinstatement.

The Washington Free Beacon quoted U.S. District Court judge Roger Benitez as finding that the district’s policy “harms the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention to determine if the incongruence is organic or whether it is the result of bullying, peer pressure, or a fleeting impulse. It harms the parents by depriving them of the long-recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to care, guide, and make health care decisions for their children. And finally, it harms plaintiffs who are compelled to violate the parent’s rights by forcing plaintiffs to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students.”

What Books Should Kids be Reading?

(Second in our series of recommended reading lists for children of all ages. We will publish additional lists in Education Reporter over the next few months. — Ed.)

Classic children’s books are scarcely to be found in school classrooms and libraries today, so parents must ensure that their kids are reading books that educate, absorb, and entertain in a manner that stimulates curiosity and increases the child’s eagerness to learn about the world.