A closer look at “The week of Spring Fever”

The deconstruction of normativity and ideals

FVD International is republishing an article from 2023 because every year the Dutch education system teaches children about sex in a highly inappropriate manner. Our criticisms and those of our colleague, the author Camille Scholtz, remain the same.

Republished from:

https://reactionair.nl/artikelen/de-week-van-de-lentekriebels-onder-de-loupe/ 

It is the Week of “Spring Fever” (Lentekriebels in Dutch), during which primary schools devote themselves to an "uplifting" project: during this week, the participating schools teach their pupils about "resilience", "relationships" and "sexuality", in line with other periods of "liberal reflection" such as Purple Friday and the various Pride weeks and months. This educational campaign is organised by the state-funded organisation Rutgers.

Often negative reactions to this increasingly prominent woke education focus on its vulgarity: the booklets for children as young as four years old talk about about oral sex, others euphemistically describe transgenderism and even sex surgery in the form of a lamb feeling like a piglet. While I can of course agree with these reactions, my real objection is ideological.

Just Naked

My objection focuses on the intended destruction of normativity and idealism. As an example, let us take the children's television show ‘Just Naked’ which is also subsidised by Rutgers. In this programme, a group of children are shown five naked adults about whom they are then allowed to ask questions. The first episode shows five fairly normal - albeit naked - people, but during the fifth episode it is already about five transgender people, with deformed bodies full of scars and traces of operations. The undertone here is that these bodies are just as ‘normal’ as any other body: normativity does not exist.

Children's Book Week

I do not want to write at length about Pim Lammers and Children’s Book Week, as Reactionair.nl has already devoted several articles to this,3 but a similar theme emerges here too. My reservations about Lammers do not necessarily concern his paedophilic short story called Trainer, but rather how his oeuvre aimed at children consists almost exclusively of critiquing and deconstructing social norms. For instance, the before mentioned book ‘The lamb which is a piglet’ (for 4 year olds and over).  His poetry collection (again, aimed at children aged from four years old) contains a poem about a non-binary aunt called Ben (pronouns: them/their). The theme of Children's Book Week was "enjoy being yourself", again implying that there is no ideal to aspire to, everyone is "unique" just as he or she or they are.

The Week of the Spring Fever

The teaching package of The Week of Spring Fever consists of presentations shown to the class by the teacher. The closing slides feature various liberal slogans such as "Everyone is unique!" and "Everyone is special!" - again subtle attacks on the notions of ideality and normativity. One of the lessons aimed at children aged five to seven is called ‘Boys or Girls?’  The self-described goal of this lesson is to "challenge students to consider whether stereotypical images about boys and girls are accurate". The lesson largely consists of questioning these "stereotypes". This subconsciously teaches children that there is no actual "man" or "woman" but only relative "social constructs" that would have no basis in reality. Similarly, in the "tips" the teaching material gives to the teacher, the tone is quite clear in what is preferable and what is not:

‘Note that this can be a difficult task for some students. Some families have (very) gender-stereotypical norms. It can be difficult for them then to think outside the box of what is 'proper'. Make sure the atmosphere remains safe by preventing and redirecting laughter and bullying.

If children have a preference for stereotypical clothes, toys or behaviours, that is of course okay too. The point is that everyone is allowed to be who they want to be.’

This second tip may seem 'neutral' at first glance, but here too a kind of subliminal messaging is used. Indeed, the sentence is in a sense reversed; the norm becomes the exception by stating that if a child still wants to dress normally ('stereotypically'), this is "of course OK too".

Another lesson aimed at children aged 7 to 10 years old is entitled “This is me!” The presentation begins with a slide entitled "The ideal man and woman". The children have to describe their ideal man or woman, after which these ideas and ideals are criticised and dismantled on subsequent slides. Again, the idea is that there is no such thing as an ideal and no such thing as a norm. This is all less sensational than the sexual woke aspects of these lessons, but is the true essence of all these pedagogical campaigns.

Being yourself and 'consent'

The only ideals which remain after the deconstruction of supposedly oppressive ideals such as masculinity and femininity are being yourself and respecting others. Everyone is allowed to develop his or her self to the maximum.  Whether such a self can develop spontaneously, and does not in fact need guidance and/or resistance from outside in order to emerge, is of no concern. Nor does the related question of whether the self is not an illusion, as Buddhist thought and contemporary brain science states. How can you possibly be something that the modern sacred Science says does not essentially exist?

The issue of whether a morality which is purely about consent – the Dutch use the English word to sound fashionable - can cope with managing human affairs (that is, after all, the task of morality) does not get the attention it deserves either.

A cynic might argue that the ideals of being yourself and valuing the other actually amount to selfishness and indifference, and are thus a cover for a cold, neoliberal anti-morality. Classical virtues like courage, honour, loyalty, wisdom and friendship have no place here.

Conclusion

This is not a new phenomenon. As I have argued before,7 woke is only the most recent iteration of liberalism. Philosophically, it is an expression of the rejection of realism and an embrace of nominalism, and so were earlier "oppressive" structures destroyed by excessive criticism and scepticism. The woke campaign against normative notions of sexuality, gender and sex, in schools and elsewhere, is just the new front.