Parental rights advocacy group Parents Defending Education (PDE) issued an alarming report on Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) newly enacted health education curriculum featuring inappropriate content taught to young children.
The curriculum covers topics from basic anatomy to gender identity and puberty blockers.
The material includes material aimed at teaching pre-Kindergarteners to “correctly identity body parts typically considered private, including nipples, penis, anus, and vulva” and requires first graders to be able to define “gender identity,” according to PDE’s report.
Teachers will introduce fifth graders to “puberty blocker medications that transgender young people may use.”
The Pre-Kindergarten Personal Health and Safety Education Unit Plan includes lessons about family structure and teaches that “no one type of family is better than another” and “all family structures are valid. In the Understanding our Bodies unit, children in pre-K learn about “basic anatomy” to “correctly identify body parts typically considered private (genitals), including nipples, anus, vulva, and penis.” They are also taught why it is important for them to know the correct names for private parts —according to the unit plan, this “this lesson supports Erin’s Law requirements.”
The Grade 1 Personal Health and Safety Education Unit Plan teaches students to “define gender, gender identity and gender role stereotypes” and “name at least two things they’ve been taught about gender role stereotypes, and how those things may limit people of all genders.”
Students will also “discuss the concept of gender so that students can then understand gender identity and gender role stereotypes” and “reflect on things like colors, toys, and careers.” The goal for the lesson is for students to “recognize that gender should not be a limiting factor in being themselves.”
Its first-grade unit plan involves introducing “the concept of reproduction and the differences between things in the world that can and cannot reproduce.”
The third-grade curriculum goes further into gender ideology with a lesson that introduces the concept of gender identity.
The Grade 3 Personal Health and Safety Education Unit Plan includes a lesson that teaches students to “explain the difference between sex assigned at birth and gender identity.” Students will “engage with the text to expand their understanding of what it can mean to be transgender and the concept of gender expression.”
It defines “transgender” as “when a person’s gender identity (how they feel) is different from what doctors/midwives assigned to them when they were born (sex assigned at birth).”
PDE’s report points out that while CPS is focused on pushing gender ideology and age-inappropriate sexual content on small children, its educational standards are lacking.
Worthy of note, only 31% of elementary school students in Chicago Public Schools were proficient in reading in the spring of 2024. In math, only 19% of Chicago third through eighth graders were proficient.
What is happening in Chicago is happening in blue and red areas across the country. It is clear that there is an ongoing shift in educational priorities, one that places ideology over academic progress. In many cases, parents are unaware that schools are focused more on indoctrinating children into far-leftist ideas on sexuality and gender than on equipping them with the skills they need to thrive as adults.
Unfortunately, most people remain ignorant about what government-run schools have become. They still do not understand that many schools have become vehicles through which political ideologies are influencing the minds of their loved ones.
Groups like Parents Defending Education are working to expose this problem and to bring about change through education and legal action. But it remains an uphill battle. Still, as more parents and taxpayers find out what these people are teaching their children, I remain hopeful that there will be enough pushback to bring about change. There is no telling when this will happen, but at some point, a reckoning is coming.
