USA to be first western country to have no Dept of Education

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I'm not. trump and his associates are trying to make you think the entire education system is some exercise in "wokeness" which is a complete distortion. Every school has its own culture and way of doing things. It is driven by the headmaster and the teaching body. If your granddaughter is not being cousneled properly then it may the individual counselor rather than the school or the entire education system.

If indeed your characterization of this particular guidance counselor is accurate, what on Earth does this have to do with the Dept of Education??? I challenge you to find an actual relevant DOE policy.

Some people confuse what you call telling students "that you think they're gay just because they're having a bad day" with simply being supportive (and respecting confidentiality) when the students themselves talk about being gay.

Anyhow, some people (not everyone, and not most people) have fluid sexual orientation that genuinely changes as they get older.

If anything, schools need to be spending more time on family/social issues. I’m saying that as a former teacher who saw toxic stuff kids were carrying from their home environments on a daily basis, including things like prejudice in its various forms. Just because a kid doesn’t have (visible) bruises doesn’t mean they aren’t being abused or aren’t in an otherwise toxic environment. Just because we didn’t have a DOE in the past doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. There were lots of things we didn’t have in the past that are valuable. Also, society changes. Our needs change.

I would’ve greatly benefited from instruction in family/social issues when I was a kid, but having homeschooled throughout most of my childhood, that wasn’t an option. I needed to learn about healthy relationships because that’s not something I was taught at home. This sort of stuff leads to serious problems on a small AND large scale which is why it needs to be thoroughly addressed by schools.

Kids need to learn about race and gender in school to push back against generational prejudice and the harm it causes in society. Obviously, instruction should be rooted in research which would often necessitate more teacher training. Now that President Bigot is in Office that’s not going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately. Rapists tend not to care too much about oppression or family/social issues in my experience.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 12 Feb 2025, 12:50 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Agreed except that we don't have "headmasters" here in the U.S.A. They are called "principals" here.

We have principals in free public schools and headmasters in private schools. I'm a veteran of the private school system hence my conditioning.

I respectfully disagree. This woman is still employed at the middle school my granddaughter attended. No one, no one would feel free to do that unless they weren't afraid of getting into trouble. Why isn't she afraid? Who sent her the message that it's okay to tell children who are facing struggles that, "have you considered you may be gay?" The child was grieving the suicide of her favorite aunt and being gay is the fix? I'm sorry, I don't see it. And I will never see it. I'm so grateful that when I was undiagnosed ND I didn't have some guidance counselor adding any kind of sexuality to the mix when I was 13. I had crushes, I had people I thought were pretty. That was as far as I needed to be, it's not always necessary to breakdown why you think someone is attractive in 8th grade. And, the woman was wrong.

Based on what you were saying, what does the counselor base their reasoning on? Anything relating to sexuality must include the parents/guardian as your granddaughter is under aged and should (technically) not be getting sexual advice without parental consent. Have either you or your grandaughter's parents intervened or sought feedback from the counselor?

I guess people don't develop the ability to say no, I don't believe that's the case until they're older than 13?

Maybe it's different for girls, but boys at that age throw around slurs that amount to accusations of being a homosexual regularly. Somehow most of them don't ever seriously consider that they might be gay. How does an adult asking about it once amount to something more significant?

In Australia homophobia is a right of passage, It doesn't stop in highschool, When I was a university student in the 1980s I was receiving daily homophobic slurs because my best friend was gay. Sure, it was 40 years ago and would not fly in 2025. But the education system is naturally in a phase where it has to weed out bullying and discrimination which if I am being honest was enabled by the teaching staff in the old days.

I feel like most video game lobbies would disagree. If there's a slur, they're throwing it.

I'd assume a portion of young males still talk like that IRL too, just like they always have.

100% agree. Young men throw around the f-word, the r-word and n-word. its happening right now as we speak.

There's two levels of horse dookie going on here.

The one is as Mona called out, that an individual employee's actions aren't proof of some sort of problem that getting rid of the DOE will address.

The second is the idea that a person asking someone if they're gay will somehow undermine the younger person's development and therefore amounts to grooming. It sure seems like grooming, as used by conservatives is a nonsense phrase that just means introducing younger people to ideas that conservatives don't approve of.

Agree with both points. Although I seriously doubt a counselor would ever ask a student their sexual preference unless their was some specific context. Like "oh your being bullied in school, your not black, not disabled, not a democrat...wait that must mean....are you gay?"...like that's never going to happen.