UN Education Summit Wants to Stamp Out Traditional Values

By | September 22, 2022

NEW YORK, September 23 (C-Fam) A UN conference on education just called for the uprooting of “violent” traditional values and the spread of comprehensive sexuality education.

The Transforming Education Summit envisions a global agenda for education run from the United Nations bureaucracy in New York. Summiteers used buzzwords like “inclusive, equitable, safe and healthy.” Governments were urged to ensure a “progressive universalism in education” with policies to uproot “entrenched cultural and societal norms that impeded inclusion, equity and equality.”

Director-General of UNESCO, Audrey Azolay said the primary ends of a 21st-century education are to teach children and youth responses to “climate change” and to support “diversity,”

One of the conference documents proposed expanding the role of the teacher from “knowledge providers to knowledge producers and sense-makers of complex realities,” in order to teach modern values and to eliminate any influence of parents and traditional cultures on the formation of children.

Left-wing youth and organizations were represented at the conference, but no conservatives were welcome.

The summit, held September 16-19 in New York, urged countries to develop more drastic policies to achieve “a better and more sustainable future for all” by 2030. In the Secretary-General’s vision statement for the summit, he wrote, “legislation and policies are essential to protect rights, promote inclusion, prevent and address all forms of violence, stigma, discrimination, and exclusion.”

Gender was everywhere in the education summit. In a session on “Gender Transformative Education,” a euphemism encompassing comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) which instills in children homosexual and transgender ideologies, Yona Nestel from Plan International urged policymakers to begin CSE at the age of 2 years old to expand “children’s ideas of what’s possible for them beyond the binary.”

“We have to start very young, from an early age,” she said, “Gender is a social construct, right? it’s learned… It’s very important to invest in the early years and ensure that gender transformative education starts as early as possible.”

The definition of gender in international law is quite good. It is a definition the left does not like. It comes in the Rome Statutes that created the International Criminal Court. Gender means “men and women in the context of society.” The International Law Commission is trying to produce a new treaty on crimes against humanity that would change this definition. But, for now the definition is men and women.

Comprehensive sexuality education is the other obsession of UN policy makers. Winnie Byanyima, UNAIDS executive director, called for the universal implementation of CSE as a means of keeping young women in school: “Comprehensive sexuality education is contentious because of tradition, religion and culture…[but] if you give a girl life skills to look after her body, you reduce the risk [of HIV] further.”

She also celebrated Education Plus, a joint initiative of five UN organizations including UNFPA and UNESCO that tackles “taboos about sexuality; change parental consent laws so adolescents can access HIV prevention, treatment and care services, and other sexual and reproductive health services.”

The UN Transforming Education Summit was not a governmental negotiation. It is the increasing tactic of the global left at the UN to have pretend negotiations where the documents produced seem normative. Countries that already receive UN and western NGO funding are susceptible to the agenda embodied in the summit. The UN is increasingly relying on non-consensus-based mechanisms to push their agenda.

On the other hand, governments are free to ignore the conclusions and recommendations of the summit.

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