It’s being scrubbed clean, sanitised, erased. They’re even coming after Shakin’ Stevens.
My child goes to one of these schools. It was the only one around or we’d be elsewhere.
As part of their “inclusive” ethos they’ve decided Christmas is offensive. You can’t mention the ‘C’ word officially, and references to it have been removed.
Our favourite song from Welsh Elvis- “Merry Christmas Everyone”, which was recorded in 1984 of all years, has been woke washed to “Seasons Greetings everyone.”
I wouldn’t believe it unless I saw it with my own eyes. In preparation for their annual ‘Winter Performance’’ and subsequent ‘Winter Raffle’ before the Winter Holidays, the kids in my child’s class will be singing ‘Winter’ songs. And they go like this:
Snow is falling
All around me
Children playing
Having fun
It’s the season
Of love and understand
Season’s Greetings everyone
It gets worse:
Time for parties and celebrations
People dancing all night long
Time for presents
And exchanging kisses
Time for singing winter songs
Nothing is innocuous in the world of woke and everything is “insensitive” and in need of purification. Maybe they should be renamed: ‘Eradicate Together’, but I won’t give them any ideas.
Some kids – in their wisdom, crossed out this nonsense and replaced it with ‘Merry Christmas.’ After all -Christmas is more about rampant consumerism than Christ, so surely it makes no sense to them.
It makes me wonder- what was the thinking behind this? In this bizzarro world, it’s presumably the school’s way of singing Christmas songs without actually acknowledging its existence- all in the vain name of “diversity”. Who says- ‘hey I have this idea to save humanity with diversity and inclusion?’ Let’s scrub out a word- it takes effort and time. Surely there’s other stuff to do in the classroom?
They’ve chained themselves to this ideology instead of being free – and are dragging those they teach along with it.
Also- I don’t want to spoil the party or anything but we already have diversity and inclusion. It’s called western democracy.
This level of woke is doomed to fail, because it’s never enough. Woke has no ceiling. Even if we erase the word Christmas from songs and censor decorations and the vernacular, the offended parties will still have to leave the building and walk into a shop, where they’ll hear Christmas songs, then they’ll see the forbidden word in social media, on the TV, in billboards. Do we have to erase them too in order to satisfy the tyrannical few?
Weirdly, the censors always have loud support from a few, even though most parents don’t care any less- foreign or Irish. But realistically -what are we talking about here- two people? Maybe three?
The ubiquity of wokeness has made us accustomed to accepting perverse ideological absurdities. If you don’t play, the punishment is hard. Conformity – aka fear of being called ‘racist, islamophobic, or the carrot of dread- far-right has silenced people into challenging this kind of nonsense. Erase a 2000 year tradition for no reason? Sure no problem.
After all, if I went to Somalia, Ramadan would be renamed and headscarves would be removed in my honour. Oh no wait.
It doesn’t work the other way around. Unless I missed something, is there a place in the world where the natives happily surrender their culture? A woke Shangri La? Do we have longitudinal data on it?
A study by More in Common found only around 8 to 10 percent of the population is woke, but they are in powerful positions. In the olden days ideas like this were not given a platform, now – because woke is deeply embedded in institutions like schools, colleges and politics where free speech is being jettisoned, you can demand anything – knowing full support is there.
The Educate Together schools logic is that parents and children sign up to this particular brand of education, so deal with it.
But many kids aren’t in these schools because they chose to be, they are there, because they couldn’t find a place elsewhere.
Funded by the taxpayer, their increasingly authoritarian ethos needs to be held under a microscope. If you tell school children to surrender Christmas to suit children from cultures who have no problem celebrating their religions and identities, hierarchies will develop. This happens in France, Germany and the UK, where ethnic children are increasingly being bullied.
If you dilute the host culture to pander to more dominant cultures, you pay the price in the school yard.
This system of sanitising, censoring and purifying is doomed to fail- because it’s just an idea, not an actual thing. Hokey Orwellian paternalistic twaddle like this cannot work when common sense prevails.
The schools should decide to go full secular or non-secular- not both. If you don’t want Christmas, there won’t be any headscarves or Ramadan and everyone could jig to John Lennon at the ‘Winter Fest’ and be done with it.
In the meantime, keep singing ‘Merry Christmas’ loud and proud and don’t mind the ‘politically correct.’ They may say- ‘its ‘just a few words’, but it’s so much more than that.