Delusional Thinking Among Educators Today

If you're seeing and hearing what I am, you’re asking yourself how in the world we got to where we are today at such breathtaking speed. 

"Drag Queen Story Hour" is now part of elementary schools and public libraries, where men dress in women’s clothing, reading homosexual-themed books to children. This, according to their own website, “captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” See https://www.dragqueenstoryhour.org/

K-12 schools now have policies like: “Some students may feel uncomfortable with a transgender student using the same sex-segregated restroom, locker room or changing facility. This discomfort is not a reason to deny access to the transgender student.”

And: “…school personnel should use the student's chosen name and pronouns appropriate to a student's gender identity, regardless of the student's assigned birth sex.”

The last two paragraphs are from the public school manual of the Massachusetts Department of Education, http://www.doe.mass.edu/sfs/lgbtq/GenderIdentity.html. These policies are not unique to Massachusetts.

Gender identity, however, is but one of many areas of delusional thinking among educators today. Other areas have to do with “race” and “class” (two words that are not part of my vocabulary).

For example, a senior vice president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently suggested that a white Christian’s attitudes about race are “deeply informed by whiteness.” Apparently because he is "white," Dr. Matthew Hall asserted, “I am a racist and I’m going to struggle with racism and white supremacy until the day I die and get my glorified body.” (The Capstone Report, July 29, 2019).

Really? Me too? Because of my skin pigmentation?

What’s going on here?

What’s going on is, various streams of 20^th century thought have merged into a common river as wide as the Mississippi. Streams of thought such as Postmodernism, Deconstructionism and Dialectical Materialism, have found their “common denominator” in an overarching idea called Critical Theory.

“Critical Race Theory,” “Literary Critical Theory,” “Critical Pedagogy,” are all sub-sets of Critical Theory. If you don’t know what Critical Theory is by name, you know it by its effects. Unless you’re living on an island, cut off from all radio, T.V., social media and billboards, you cannot escape its current. We’re being flooded by its weight.

It goes way beyond education.

Next week: Critical Theory 101.

Posted by Dr. Christian Overman