The arrival of the Bayrou government in office coincided with the accelerated implementation of a new, openly militant sex education programme in French schools, completely excluding parents from the process. Despite the mobilisation of parents’ associations, there is no indication that the Ministry of Education intends to back down.
All the indicators are red; the skill level of young French children is plummeting year after year; the basics—reading, writing, arithmetic—are not mastered by the time they start secondary school; but the stated priority of the Ministry of Education is “relational, sexual and emotional” education.
The new sex education curriculum has been in the works for almost two years. The project was created on the initiative of former Education Minister Pap Ndiaye, known for his militant progressivism, who made it one of his priorities.
An initial version, made public in December 2024 by the previous government, raised concerns among parents and family associations. Even the then-minister for school success, Alexandre Portier, expressed his reservations at the time—before being pilloried by the press and teachers’ unions for being too conservative.
In the meantime, the government fell apart. Portier was not reappointed to his post, and a new minister of education arrived in the person of Élisabeth Borne, former prime minister. The learning framework has been reworked—and the changes made do nothing to correct the flaws already observed in the previous version.
35,000 people had signed a petition calling for a revision of the text. They were not heard, and the Higher Council for Education (Conseil supérieur de l’éducation) has just definitively validated an extremely worrying curriculum, which is to be applied in all French schools from the next school year—whether they are state schools or private ones under contract with the state.
A symbolic and particularly revealing element sets the tone for the spirit in which the course of study was conceived. Parents were supposed to be informed in advance of the “education in emotional, relational and sexual life” (Education à la vie affective, relationnelle et sexuelle, or EVARS) sessions, but this clause has been removed. The refusal to inform parents about what their children will be told shows that the forces behind the development of this programme know full well that it is a militant tool that does not respect the basic principles of healthy pedagogical neutrality on highly sensitive subjects.
The stated objectives were to strengthen equality between men and women, to combat violence, and to raise awareness of harassment from an early age. But the means used are clearly inappropriate, even counterproductive. The Syndicat de la famille (Family Union), an offshoot of the La Manif Pour Tous movement formed at the time of the adoption of same-sex marriage, has carried out an in-depth analysis of the course outline.
The fight against gender inequality is transformed, from nursery school onwards, into a systematic deconstruction of images of the feminine and masculine in young children: “on the obviously laudable grounds of equality, the fight against gender stereotypes is omnipresent from nursery school onwards, in the form of a systematic challenge to all the mental representations that children may have of the feminine and masculine,” the Family Union’s report laments.
Despite the protests of the curriculum’s editors—for whom “gender theory does not exist”—pride of place is given to an ideology which deliberately disconnects sex and gender, to make students think that gender (i.e., the social and cultural expression of sexual identity) is totally independent of sex (biological).
Beyond its practical recommendations, the teaching plan claims to fight against extremely serious problems currently blighting childhood and the adult world—sexual violence, harassment—but is unable to produce an alternative positive discourse that allows young people in the process of developing their personality to envision positive and inspiring values. Nothing on the couple, nothing on motherhood, nothing on fatherhood. The programme prides itself on considering relationships not only in sexual terms but also in ‘relational and emotional’ terms but is reluctant to connect love and sexuality—a necessarily retrograde vision in the eyes of its writers—not to mention the connection between love, sexuality, and family.
The document reveals the total and systematic evacuation of any form of morality. Thus, the notion of consent, so beloved of the progressive Left and brought to the fore by the “#me too” movement, is reduced to a banal dichotomy: I want to / I don’t want to—without any reflection on the merits of the act, for oneself, for the other, or on the harmony to be sought between the body and the heart. This sketches a sad and dreary landscape where depression and suicide attempts among young people can boom. If no one speaks to them seriously and no one cares about offering them an inspiring ideal and a real prospect of fulfilment, how can we be surprised?
The scourge of pornography, which does so much damage to teenagers and children alike—and at an increasingly early age—is totally underestimated, because here again, a firm condemnation of its ravages implies the integration of a moral reflection. We now know full well that children as young as primary school age are already being exposed to pornography, but the curriculum does not address this until the 4th year (13-year-olds), with a guilty shyness. Let us be logical: moral safeguards cannot be put in place when those behind the instructional content claim to be ‘taboo-free’ and advocate unbridled sexual liberation—which gives rise to the very ills they claim to be fighting.
Finally, we note the predictable but oh-so-dangerous complacency towards transgenderism and gender transition among young people: nothing on the dangers of puberty blockers, nothing on the risks of hormone intake and gender reassignment surgery. If gender has nothing to do with biology, then anything goes, and information on these subjects will, unsurprisingly, be left in the hands of duly blessed militant associations and authorized and recommended by the Ministry of National Education.
A curriculum of similar substance has already been implemented in French-speaking Belgium. Four administrative appeals for the annulment of the educational plan are pending before the Belgian constitutional court. In France, teachers’ unions are crying out against the “fundamentalist offensive” protesting the new plan. In terms of fundamentalism, it is simply a matter of recalling Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”
New French Sex Ed Plan Opens Gate to Gender Ideology
Piqsels
The arrival of the Bayrou government in office coincided with the accelerated implementation of a new, openly militant sex education programme in French schools, completely excluding parents from the process. Despite the mobilisation of parents’ associations, there is no indication that the Ministry of Education intends to back down.
All the indicators are red; the skill level of young French children is plummeting year after year; the basics—reading, writing, arithmetic—are not mastered by the time they start secondary school; but the stated priority of the Ministry of Education is “relational, sexual and emotional” education.
The new sex education curriculum has been in the works for almost two years. The project was created on the initiative of former Education Minister Pap Ndiaye, known for his militant progressivism, who made it one of his priorities.
An initial version, made public in December 2024 by the previous government, raised concerns among parents and family associations. Even the then-minister for school success, Alexandre Portier, expressed his reservations at the time—before being pilloried by the press and teachers’ unions for being too conservative.
In the meantime, the government fell apart. Portier was not reappointed to his post, and a new minister of education arrived in the person of Élisabeth Borne, former prime minister. The learning framework has been reworked—and the changes made do nothing to correct the flaws already observed in the previous version.
35,000 people had signed a petition calling for a revision of the text. They were not heard, and the Higher Council for Education (Conseil supérieur de l’éducation) has just definitively validated an extremely worrying curriculum, which is to be applied in all French schools from the next school year—whether they are state schools or private ones under contract with the state.
A symbolic and particularly revealing element sets the tone for the spirit in which the course of study was conceived. Parents were supposed to be informed in advance of the “education in emotional, relational and sexual life” (Education à la vie affective, relationnelle et sexuelle, or EVARS) sessions, but this clause has been removed. The refusal to inform parents about what their children will be told shows that the forces behind the development of this programme know full well that it is a militant tool that does not respect the basic principles of healthy pedagogical neutrality on highly sensitive subjects.
The stated objectives were to strengthen equality between men and women, to combat violence, and to raise awareness of harassment from an early age. But the means used are clearly inappropriate, even counterproductive. The Syndicat de la famille (Family Union), an offshoot of the La Manif Pour Tous movement formed at the time of the adoption of same-sex marriage, has carried out an in-depth analysis of the course outline.
The fight against gender inequality is transformed, from nursery school onwards, into a systematic deconstruction of images of the feminine and masculine in young children: “on the obviously laudable grounds of equality, the fight against gender stereotypes is omnipresent from nursery school onwards, in the form of a systematic challenge to all the mental representations that children may have of the feminine and masculine,” the Family Union’s report laments.
Despite the protests of the curriculum’s editors—for whom “gender theory does not exist”—pride of place is given to an ideology which deliberately disconnects sex and gender, to make students think that gender (i.e., the social and cultural expression of sexual identity) is totally independent of sex (biological).
Beyond its practical recommendations, the teaching plan claims to fight against extremely serious problems currently blighting childhood and the adult world—sexual violence, harassment—but is unable to produce an alternative positive discourse that allows young people in the process of developing their personality to envision positive and inspiring values. Nothing on the couple, nothing on motherhood, nothing on fatherhood. The programme prides itself on considering relationships not only in sexual terms but also in ‘relational and emotional’ terms but is reluctant to connect love and sexuality—a necessarily retrograde vision in the eyes of its writers—not to mention the connection between love, sexuality, and family.
The document reveals the total and systematic evacuation of any form of morality. Thus, the notion of consent, so beloved of the progressive Left and brought to the fore by the “#me too” movement, is reduced to a banal dichotomy: I want to / I don’t want to—without any reflection on the merits of the act, for oneself, for the other, or on the harmony to be sought between the body and the heart. This sketches a sad and dreary landscape where depression and suicide attempts among young people can boom. If no one speaks to them seriously and no one cares about offering them an inspiring ideal and a real prospect of fulfilment, how can we be surprised?
The scourge of pornography, which does so much damage to teenagers and children alike—and at an increasingly early age—is totally underestimated, because here again, a firm condemnation of its ravages implies the integration of a moral reflection. We now know full well that children as young as primary school age are already being exposed to pornography, but the curriculum does not address this until the 4th year (13-year-olds), with a guilty shyness. Let us be logical: moral safeguards cannot be put in place when those behind the instructional content claim to be ‘taboo-free’ and advocate unbridled sexual liberation—which gives rise to the very ills they claim to be fighting.
Finally, we note the predictable but oh-so-dangerous complacency towards transgenderism and gender transition among young people: nothing on the dangers of puberty blockers, nothing on the risks of hormone intake and gender reassignment surgery. If gender has nothing to do with biology, then anything goes, and information on these subjects will, unsurprisingly, be left in the hands of duly blessed militant associations and authorized and recommended by the Ministry of National Education.
A curriculum of similar substance has already been implemented in French-speaking Belgium. Four administrative appeals for the annulment of the educational plan are pending before the Belgian constitutional court. In France, teachers’ unions are crying out against the “fundamentalist offensive” protesting the new plan. In terms of fundamentalism, it is simply a matter of recalling Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”
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