Rainbow textbooks adopted in California

In 2016, when California officially added LGBT mandates to the state-approved curriculum, the San Francisco Chronicle called the event “a landmark move that puts the ongoing LGBT civil rights fight into the mainstream of public education.” Publishers duly responded, as they have with previous state laws and guidelines. They created schoolbooks that, among many instructional tasks, select, recognize, and feature historical figures based on their sexuality. Outing historical figures, often based on thin speculation, is new to school-level history, and many historians and textbook editors are uneasy with the trend, but California authorities rejected non-conforming submissions…

What in the world is a television personality like Ellen DeGeneres doing in a first-grade social-studies textbook? If you ask, many educators will look at you funny. If you exclaim that these are little children, that lesbian is a complicated word for six-year-olds, or that age-inappropriate might be an understatement here, heads will shake. If you say that sexualizing historical figures like Emily Dickinson or Florence Nightingale marginalizes their achievements, they will think you are the problem to overcome…

Not just in California but nationwide, curriculum supervisors at all levels, by law or partiality, won’t consider volumes unless they align to multicultural premises. Old-style textbooks have been taken out of print. As a result, teachers and parents are finding it close to impossible to avoid lessons saturated in identity politics.