A great leap forward in our schools?

There was once a time when people in Western societies looked down on the openly ideological states, like communist China in the time of Mao. Below is a picture of Chinese school children reciting Maoist propaganda during the Great Leap Forward:

But Western states are starting to mimic the style of these ideological states.

The Western states have a liberal ideology which asserts that the overriding good in society is a freedom to self-define or self-create. Therefore, unchosen, predetermined qualities like our sex and our sexuality have to be made not to matter - they are to have no influence over what we choose to do or be. In a liberal order we are to self-define our sex and our sexuality uniquely from a buffet of options.

Enter the new school curriculum here in Victoria:

Schoolchildren as young as four will be shown pictures of boys doing the dishes and girls playing footy in a bid to stamp out gender stereotypes.

Year one and two students will play games teaching that some kids have two mums or two dads and teens will be taught the meaning of terms like pansexual and cisgender.

The changes come as part of a newly released education curriculum by the Victorian Government, which will be made a mandatory subject in all state primary and secondary schools at the start of 2017.

The youngest students will be chanting the state ideology in our classrooms:

Year 1 and 2 students are encouraged to chant statements such as: “Girls can play football, can be doctors and can be strong”, and “boys can cry when they are hurt, can be gentle, can be nurses and can mind babies”.

Victorian Chinese state school students chanting propaganda

And there's this:

Children will be taught from an early age the importance of challenging male and female-based labels in the playground and classroom.

Students in their final year of high school will be educated in 'gender literacy', with lessons about identities including: cisgender, transgender, transman, transwoman and gender fluid.

Those students will also be taught the difference between gender and sexuality, and schooled on sexuality preferences including heterosexual, bisexual, asexual and pansexual.

It makes me wonder if the West has now surpassed the former Communist East in its radicalism. It's true that the first leader of the Bolshevik women's department, Alexandra Kollontai, had ideas similar to our Education Minister. She too wanted to erase the binary sex distinction. She gave speeches in which she:

longs for the female body itself to become less soft and curvy and more muscular ... She argues that prehistoric women were physiologically less distinct from men ... Accordingly, sexual dimorphism may (and should) again become less visible in a communist society.

But Kollontai soon become sidelined in the Bolshevik Government as being too far to the left. I doubt if either Lenin or Stalin were as radical as our Education Minister in denying heterosexuality as the norm, or in wanting to erase the male/female sex distinction.

Western societies are not yet as authoritarian as the communist ones, but modernist ideology has now been taken further with us than it ever was with them.