The Minister of Education of Ukraine is ordering the rewriting of school textbooks to remove the words “parents” and pictures that feature the daddy-mommy-kids families. Because it’s important to be inclusive and not hurt the feelings of the kids who don’t live with both parents. 40% of school children in Ukraine don’t live with their fathers, apparently.
I never thought that this particular type of crazy would spread to Ukraine.
What do you suppose is behind these sort of grandiose international efforts at collective social engineering?
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As someone growing up without a father, I am not for exclusion of full families but I am for inclusion of not full ones too.
And not, as often happens in public discourse, always showing them in various negative ways, especially considering the idealization of full families.
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I thought that divorce and children not living with both parents was extremely common in the USSR (when one of the divorcing paretns could find somewhere else to live which certainly wasn’t always).
This seems less about modern gender orthodoxy and more about children not having one or both parents not around through divorce or economic migration (or other things I don’t know about). Not long after Poland joined the EU there was a rash of grandparents having to take care of kids because both parents were working abroad (sometimes in different countries).
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It’s the legacy of the shortage of men because of the wars and genocide. Fathers are considered dispensable and interchangeable. I have held many online debates with Russian-speaking women who very sincerely don’t see a difference between a father and a man mommy happens to approve of at the moment. The idea that a child might need the actual, real father or at least might need to know who he is seems completely alien to them. And this mentality self-perpetuates across generations.
It’s tragic and the last thing anybody needs is to offer any official support to it.
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“don’t see a difference between a father and a man mommy happens to approve of at the moment”
That attitude exists in Poland but is mostly restricted to the ‘margines’ (uneducated underclass) and I had a neighbor like that (pregnant by the probably married guy who was paying her rent and with a couple of other kids in tow). When they finally moved out (I think other neighbors had put pressure on their landlord) it apparently took the owners quite a while to fix the apartment they were in. There was also a loud, dirty dog that they didn’t have the remotest idea how to deal with, poor thing.
This might be another advantage of Poland being more religious than other countries in the area. Intact families are very much the norm (though starting to weaken with more prosperity). Of course that brings its own problems with it, but probably better than the alternative….
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Religion didn’t survive in the former USSR, so if this ever gets repaired, it will only be as a result of a long and patient reeducation by the government. The most natural human links were broken by the USSR. Now somebody has to rebuild them. And instead they go and do this because they heard that the words diversity and inclusion gratify the West. It’s so stupid.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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