The annual South by Southwest EDU conference is returning to Austin this week, with sessions on how public-school teachers can incorporate woke ideologies in their classrooms.
SXSW EDU 2023 will include sessions on how to make “safe and inclusive spaces” for gender-confused children and how to fight “far-right extremists.” Other sessions will take on topics ranging from why children should be taught how to use porn at school to why drag story hours are necessary for children. Science teachers can even learn how to make their lessons “justice oriented.”
Family activists and education reformers say it is unconscionable that tax dollars will be used to pay for teachers’ attendance at the event. Rather than provide best practices in education, they say, the program reads more like far-left propaganda.
One session scheduled for this week, which was originally reported by Texas Scorecard last year, is titled “Why Porn Literacy Belongs In Schools.” The host, a porn intimacy coordinator, will tell teachers how pornographic literature can be used to illustrate details of all forms of sex. The panel will show how porn should be incorporated into public high school sex ed curricula.
These pornographic materials and illustrations give students detailed instructions on how to perform sexual acts with anyone—including themselves.
Teachers will also be instructed on how to create a more “inclusive” classroom in “Kitchen Convos: Creating Trans Inclusive Spaces,” a program that will be led by Ginger Chun of the Transgender Education Network of Texas.
“Inclusive” classrooms require teachers to openly discuss sexual orientation and identity and sex life with students, instead of leaving that responsibility with parents. Teachers will also be instructed to maintain a “safe” space in their classrooms, where students are allowed to come forward with their gender dysphoria and teachers will keep it a secret from their parents.
This year’s featured session, “Drag Story Hour: Fight for Queer Herstories,” will promote drag story hours at schools and will feature three crossdressing men giving an example of what they believe is an “acceptable drag story hour.”
“Have we lost our minds as a society? Who thinks that it is acceptable for minors to be subjected to this lunacy?” asked Chris Hopper, president of Texas Family Project.
The program’s main message will be focused on the “importance” of drag for children as the hosts explain that “traditional drag” can be used to “activate children’s imaginations.”
According to Jaco Booyens of Jaco Booyens Ministries, drag plants a harmful seed of gender dysphoria and sexual confusion in children’s minds. Booyens explains that research shows it is harmful to artificially direct children’s natural curiosity towards sex before their minds are appropriately developed.
SXSW EDU 2023 is also going to be showing teachers how to disrupt “right extremist” censorship while “staying out of as much trouble as possible” at a session titled “Disrupting Censorship in Schools.” The session will include a discussion “about microaggressive policies” that “scare teachers into silence,” including bans on critical race theory in schools.
There will also be instruction on how teachers can incorporate equity and inclusion in science classrooms through “justice-oriented” teaching. According to a panel moderator, “Justice-oriented science teaching explicitly probes how inequity manifests in the ways we construct and engage with science.”
Parents and taxpayers should be concerned that Texas’ teachers will bring these notions into their classrooms.
“The idea of transforming science rooms into justice-oriented science classrooms is a joke and, simply put, laughable,” said Hopper.
“The 2023 SXSW EDU conference should be the least-attended conference in [SXSW] history,” he added. “This is absolutely unbelievable. Where is the outrage over this blatantly woke, leftist agenda? I would argue that any adult attending this conference is not an educator but rather a groomer with subversive plans for the impressionable young people they will be given the responsibility of teaching. Parents, beware.”
Last year, four Texas schools spent more than $25,000 combined to send educators to attend the SXSW EDU conference.
Austin Independent School District spent more than $4,000, Fort Worth ISD paid more than $9,000, and San Antonio ISD sent one teacher for $525. Round Rock ISD paid more than $12,000 in registration fees to send 30 employees to SXSW.
Concerned parents and citizens can contact their local school district to find out if they plan to send employees to the SXSW EDU conference with taxpayer dollars.
