“And I began to see that I was just as strange to them as they were strange to me.”
– The Sneetches and Other Stories
The controversial social networking platform, TikTok, continues to explode with video after video of woke teachers spilling their secrets on how to educate public school students about gender, sexuality, and politics. In one instance, a transgender first-grade teacher tells his K-2 classroom how doctors “guess” a baby’s gender at birth, but may, in fact, be wrong. Another non-binary preschool teacher requires her 4-year-old students to select a pronoun pin to reflect their desired gender for each day. Some teachers are even coaching children into identifying as transexual, then renaming them by their opposite gender, all without the consent and knowledge of their parents. Their goal? To make their LGBTQ+ lifestyle more acceptable to the public and to expand their reach.
While it is appropriate to teach children to be empathetic to all, including people who may seem a little strange or different, the methods used by these activists’ educators on small children are not.
In Dr. Seuss’s 1961 children’s book, “The Sneetches and Other Stories”, Dr. Seuss reveals through four separate tales the lessons of tolerance, cooperation, uniqueness, and friendliness. Both entertaining and instructive, Seuss provides age-appropriate fables for children 4 to 7. Like many other Seuss stories, The Sneetches became so popular that it has since been adapted as both an animated TV special, and more recently, a Netflix exclusive.
In the first of his collection, Seuss begins with the story of “The Sneetches”, where an inferiority complex develops within a segment of the community who do not look like the rest. That is, until a rogue character comes to town and offers them the chance to cosmetically change their appearance. After recognizing the man for the scam artist he is, the Sneetches learn to accept themselves the way they are, by acknowledging that no one is superior to the other.
In “The Zax”, two groups meet on a road and enter into a standoff, not allowing one to bypass the other. After vowing to “Never Budge, the Zax learn about the consequences of stubbornness after realizing that their refusal to move only delayed their own progress. As their inflexibility continued, the world went on without them. And since most disagreements can be solved through negotiation, it is best to work together in good faith to come to a fair solution.
Individuality and uniqueness are the moral of the story in “Too Many Daves” when a mom begins to see the error of her ways after giving all twenty-three of her sons the same name. It is a tale about the problems that arise when we are too much alike and lose our distinctiveness and originality. The beauty is, that no two people are alike, nor should we ever strive to be anyone but ourselves.
Seuss ends his enlightening book with, “What Was I Scared Of?”, a silly tale of how quickly the tables can be turned on us when our fears about something strange and threatening result in that scary thing being afraid of us. We soon realize that we may be as peculiar to others, as they are to us.
Learning through books is not just a tool to increase vocabulary by discovering new words, but also about opening minds to new ideas and new worlds. Fictional accounts are a good way for young children to develop empathy for characters and relate to their experiences, as well as a more suitable approach to teaching children how to accept and get along with others.
Unfortunately, many in the current culture are in a hurry to force children to grow up, lose their innocence, and worse, be used as political props. These radical teachers should and are being doxed for their unethical exploitation of children. Thankfully parents are responding to these and other extreme policies, currently being instituted by progressive school boards across the country. Public schools need to return to the jurisdiction of their local communities before they reap the consequences of their folly.
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