This week on News With Views I published a column, “This Best Book is the Worst” ( http://www.newswithviews.com/Duigon/lee215.htm ), about a book called Boy Meets Boy that was chosen Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Assn. A brief descriptive blurb will suffice: “Paul’s simple high-school life is confused by his desire for another boy who seems unattainable, until Paul’s friends help him find the courage to pursue him.”
I thought that was pretty sickening. But a reader from New Zealand has alerted me to an even filthier book that also won a big award, the New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year. This is a book about teenagers at a boarding school, boys having sex with their male teachers and with each other, taking a whole lot of drugs, cursing and getting cursed at… I mean, what’s not to like? It’s called Into the River–which is possibly the best place to toss it.
This is Young Adult fiction, these days: a boiling cauldron of filth. Earlier in my lifetime, anyone who tried to purvey to minors the kind of stuff that gets Best Book honors today, would have been arrested and thrown into jail.
And my question is, simply, this: Don’t the parents care? Are you guys all right with your 14-year-old sons reading this stuff? You seem to be all right with your children being “educated” by persons who think this garbage belongs on a students’ recommended reading list. Is this what you want being pumped into your children’s minds?
Oh, we care! We care plenty! But we continue to send our kids, five days a week, to schools where Boy Meets Boy and Into the River are on the reading lists, on the shelves of the school library with golden stickers on their covers, and deeply imbedded in the ideology of our children’s “educators.”
It just doesn’t look like caring.
This all started when we decided God had no place in our schools. Then we created ‘latch key kids’. What on earth did we expect to happen? Parents abdicated their responsibility, leaving it to day care centers and ‘educators’, thus, allowing our children to be indoctrinated. Thank God for those parents who homeschool. This nation has become so reprobate that I’m not sure there’s a way out except for serious and collective repentance and prayer.
That would work, if we tried it.
Sometimes the parents don’t know what the kids are reading, because the kids aren’t allowed to take the filth home or even tell their parents about it. Part of the agenda is to separate the kids from their parents or even to get the kids to reject the parents. Then the State can become the Parent.
I recently read an interesting article by Allen West about the whole leftist agenda: https://www.allenbwest.com/2017/08/30/heres-progressive-lefts-war-strategy-endgame/ It’s along the lines of what I keep saying, i.e., that each bit of lunacy is part of the attempt to undermine people’s ability to see reality.
Allen West has hit the bullseye, and I urge everyone to read his commentary. Thanks, Phoebe.
Good point, Phoebe. The schools don’t necessarily want the parents to know what they are teaching. Even when I was in school, there were materials in the school library that my parents would not have approved of and I wonder how many parents knew what was actually available to students.
At a certain high school where I taught, the “sex education” textbooks could not be taken out of the classroom and no substitute teachers were ever used for the course. This was to keep it all a secret from the parents.
They might as well have used a bullhorn.
IMO, sex education should be done by parents: period. Unfortunately, many parents do not step up to this challenge. This is tragic, because children are then exposed to the lowest common denominator of what they learn from friends, their school or other sources. Because curiosity plays a role in all of this, children whom have not had sexual matters explained to them by their parents can easily be misled by others for nefarious purposes.
When schools seek to conceal what they teach about sex, they are playing right into this process. I’m with Lee on this, I don’t believe in the public school system anymore.
No wonder the American Library Association is not singing the praises of the Bell mountain series – no sex, perversion, or expletives in it.
I let the reader take it for granted that all the characters came into the world in the ordinary way.
Non gender-normative stork? 🙂
Unkinowable, you made me literally LOL! Good thing I didn’t have a mouthful of water at the time, or my keyboard would have been deluged.
I figure that’s probably what they are teaching in public school, at this point. 🙂
When my sons attended school, I spent a lot of time visiting both class rooms and library, went to a lot of meetings, took people to task when
I didn’t approve, then did a lot of tutoring at home and counseling to
reverse a lot of stuff. If I had kids in school now— I wouldn’t.