Rhea*, 23, wanted to become a childcare teacher out of her love for young children. She enrolled in an early childhood education course in Gold Coast, hoping to learn about children’s development, how to take care of them and broaden their world through play-based learning.
She was expecting her student experience to be “practical.” But one month into her course, she found some of the content in the class confusing.
Gender identity theories, postmodernism, poststructuralism, racism, and power struggles are now considered essential knowledge for preschool teachers.
A compulsory reading for her course titled ‘Programming and Planning in Early Childhood Settings,’ viewed by The Epoch Times, stated that “identities, including what it means to be a boy or a girl, are socially constructed.”
In its section about gender, the book encouraged educators to “work with children and families to challenge children’s preconceptions” and “take a critical perspective in analysing gender roles in popular media and educational texts.”
It also told educators to “understand how gendered roles are constructed and how power relations impact on children’s play and their social futures.”
“Educators can use instances of children crossing traditional gender boundaries as opportunities to open up discussions about the limitations of traditional gendered roles and the exploration of alternative practices,” the book said.
“Educators can work with children to help them analyse their own play and gendered relations and to deconstruct dominant discourses.”
The Epoch Times understands the book is widely used as a textbook across multiple university early childhood education courses in Australia, including the Australian Catholic University, Macquarie University, Deakin University, Charles Sturt University, Queensland University of Technology and Swinburne University.
Early childhood courses are becoming increasingly popular with young Australians and international students as the state and federal governments channel more funding into the childcare sector to overcome increasing staff shortages currently being experienced. In 2022, the Commonwealth invested $1.84 billion (US$1.17 billion) over four years in the sector under the Preschool Reform Agreement, while the New South Wales (NSW) government invested $1.4 billion over four years under the Affordable Preschool funding.Post-structuralism and Gender Bending In Childcare Courses
There are also other materials given to university students studying to be preschool teachers that raise concerns.
A core subject for an early childhood course in one university in Sydney includes a stipulated textbook called “Play in the Early Years,” which has a chapter about how to implement post-structuralism in children’s learning.
It gives an example of a childcare teacher named Miriam Giugni, who wrote about her experiences of “being an activist teacher,” such as when she “actively resisted the gendered perspective being put forward.”
“When Miriam says she is an activist, she refers to her deep commitment to issues of social justice,” the book said.
“Miriam’s centre educates 46 Australian children aged from birth to six years. The staff represent a diversity of ethnicities, genders, sexualities and qualifications.”
The textbook quoted a post-structural theorist who argued that children’s play “is not always either fun or innocent, and can involve politics.”
“In terms of social justice, it doesn’t matter whether it is ‘educational’ or ‘free’ play as it is still vested with relationships of power.”
To illustrate how teachers can put these theories into practice, the book provided an example in which a childcare teacher shared her approach when she heard a girl named Madison tell another kid that she was a boy.
“Did she really say, ‘I’m not a girl! I’m a boy?’ This is juicy data!” the teacher is quoted as saying in her recollection of the book. “I have to talk to Madison about her play. Why is she pretending to be a boy? I wonder who else is a gender bender? How might I find out?”
The book suggested teachers can also apply critical and feminist post-structuralist lenses when creating play scenarios for children. For example, teachers can read or role-play stories to “create different endings from the common fairytale plot, where everyone lives happily ever after if they get married.”
“Children can also grow up and live happily ever after if they don’t marry.”
Another example is to adjust the storylines of the children’s story Goldilocks and the Three Bears, in which the biggest bear is the father, the middle-sized bear is the mother, and the smallest bear is the baby bear.
“New storylines can be created, such as mother bear being the biggest, or two daddy bears and baby bear as the family unit or an emphasis on gender-neutral bears.”
Other teaching materials in early childhood courses viewed by The Epoch Times also featured concepts of post-structuralism and post-modernism, which branched out from cultural Marxism, a critical theory that views society through the lens of class struggles.
Influence of Cultural Marxism
According to a special report by the Heritage Foundation, cultural Marxism promotes the abolishment of Western tradition and norms “under the pretence of social justice.”
Instead of setting up conflicts between workers and capitalists as classic Marxism does, cultural Marxism uses race and gender to drive wedges between social groups.
“Cultural Marxism is thus a remodelled Marxism, a mutation. The cultural Marxists’ goal is not to improve the system, but to overturn the existing social order entirely—which they consider to be an enforcer of ‘white supremacy.’”
Meanwhile, Augusto Zimmermann, head of law at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, said Marxism also advocated for the abolishment of the nuclear family.Rhea told The Epoch Times that she didn’t understand “why this knowledge is deemed important for preschool teachers while it’s unlikely that they can be put to practical use in our teaching practice.”
“I think it’s unnecessary,” she said.
Meanwhile, there has been an increasing number of children and adolescents having gender dysphoria and choosing to undergo hormonal and surgical procedures to change their gender with the support of their teachers and classmates. According to research commissioned by Reuters in 2022, more than 42,000 children were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in the U.S, which is nearly triple that from 2017.
Rhea said educators are being taught that gender identities are universal and that this will have an impact on the children they teach.
“Kids are easily influenced by the opinions of people around them like teachers,” she said.
“Teachers might adopt these [critical] theories with the intention of benefiting the children but instead it would create obstacles for the kids’ thought processes.”
“[As a preschool teacher,] I want to learn how to nurture children and help them become good and charitable people, to improve their mental and physical well-being. This is ‘diverse’ in its own way.”
However, another preschool teacher, Cynthia*, who attended college for her training, said that she had not seen any notable impact of the critical theories in early childhood settings because “we don’t have any time to talk about theories in a childcare centre.”
She also noted she hadn’t encountered these theories in her educational courses.
Cynthia stressed that preschool teachers have a significant responsibility when it comes to imparting values to the children.
“They’re like paper; whatever you put into their mind will be the foundation for their growth,” she said.
*The names of the interviewees have been changed to protect their privacy.
