Just what our kids need in school; LGBTQ+ history of sodomites!
‘Scotland has officially become the first country in the world to implement a required LGBTQ+ curriculum in schools after a new teacher toolkit launched this week. Educators now have access to a website offering an e-learning course on teaching topics related to the LGBTQ+ community, as well as a host of inclusive lesson plans and educational support materials, according to Scottish news outlet The Scotsman.
While LGBTQ+ subjects will be taught explicitly, the new curriculum also seeks to integrate inclusion into everyday learning. Lessons offered on the website range from exercises on discrimination to a math problem involving a young girl purchasing Father’s Day cards for her two dads.
While the new curricula were created, in part, for students to receive a more well-rounded education, the Scottish government also hopes the lessons will help reduce bullying. LGBTQ+ youth in the U.K. are twice as likely to have been bullied in the past year than their straight, cisgender classmates, according to a June study released by the youth advocacy group Just Like Us.
Scotland’s history-making curriculum is in large part due to the efforts of Time for Inclusive Education (TIE), an LGBTQ+ advocacy group that successfully lobbied the Scottish Parliament to implement nationwide inclusive learning. In 2017, the country’s government created the “LGBTI Inclusive Education Working Group,” which consisted of TIE and several other pro-LGBTQ+ groups, to investigate deepening inclusion in schools. A year later, the government accepted all 33 of its recommendations.
“Everything we’re trying to do here is all very, very Christian,” TIE Co-founder Liam Stevenson told them. in 2019. “It’s about looking after one another, it’s about respecting one another, and it’s about caring for and loving one another and producing healthy young people.”’
