Parents: Know What Your Student Is Learning at School!

Editor’s note: This article contains a frank discussion of a curriculum that contains sexual content.

What if I told you that there was a group of people who gathered children together around a candle and had them swear an oath of secrecy and obedience? Would that sound normal, or would you think it’s the plot of a bad mystery novel? Now what if I added that this group claimed to just be helping kids mature into functional adults? Would you believe them? Now what if I told you that this group is active in supposedly conservative Christian schools on multiple continents, but primarily Australia?

Everything I just told you is not supposition. It’s The Rite Journey, a nonprofit based in Australia that claims “to support the development of self-aware, responsible, respectful, resilient, resourceful and reflective adults.”1 Their explicit goal is to develop “global citizens.”2

The phrase “global citizens” ought to serve as a warning. There is no global government, so there cannot be global citizens. However, for those interested in creating a global government, it would be very convenient if there happened to be tons of people already thinking of themselves as global citizens.

But the problems with The Rite Journey go much deeper. Answers in Genesis has viewed their student guidebooks and their teacher guidebooks, kindly provided to us by a brave student and family.3 The program is deeply concerning, as the following highlights will reveal. This is particularly relevant to parents sending their children to Christian schools, as a “Scripture-based” version is used in some Christian schools across several countries.4 While the “Scripture-based” version has more allusions to religion than the default teacher’s book, it is in no way biblical, as this article will show.

Secrecy and Vulnerability

One of the first things the workbook attempts to do is get students used to the idea of being vulnerable. This is a common strategy used by cults: exploiting vulnerability to bring people into the community.5 Students are inherently vulnerable as minors in a classroom where the power dynamic encourages obedience to the teacher. So the curriculum intentionally exploits that vulnerability by asking students to share extremely personal things with the class.6 Another common tactic of cults is, once vulnerable people have been identified and recruited, they are isolated from those around them.7 The Rite Journey does this too, swearing students to secrecy about what they discuss in the class8—which should be a big red flag to every parent and Christian school!

The curriculum also creates instant opportunities for discomfort by having students point out someone they have a disagreement with at the beginning of the class to ask for a fresh start. Then, it suggests that teachers do the same toward students!9 The potential for problems with this approach are manifold. How can a student trust a teacher to be impartial if they know, for a fact, that the teacher has an issue with them? How well is having young-teenage children publicly tell each other what they don’t like about each other going to go? While disagreement and dislike are unavoidable, there are better ways to deal with it, such as having children acknowledge their own sinful tendencies to devalue others and esteem themselves more highly than they should. This would have been an excellent place to give the students biblical guidelines (Philippians 2:3; 1 Corinthians 13).

Redefining Biblical Truth

The curriculum discusses values, listing a litany of things they consider good values for their students to imitate. Among them are “openness,” “vulnerability,” and “acceptance.”10 None of those are biblical values. We are to reject the things God rejects.

After discussing values, The Rite Journey talks about truth, remaining open to truth being relative.11 Yet as Christians, we have a source of absolute truth: the Word of God! That never appears in The Rite Journey. In fact, I can’t find even an allusion to the Bible anywhere in their workbook, though there are passages quoted in the teacher guides. There are, however, a full page of quotations in the workbook presented as “wisdom” from the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism.12 Of course, the curriculum suggests that the best way to honor God is not obedience but to be yourself,13 so perhaps it is not the best source of theology education.

The Rite Journey gives students the opportunity to redefine family. Instead of affirming the biblical definition of a family as one man and one woman, for life, with their children, the guidebook says that “family can mean different things to different people.”14

Gender Politics

Hinting at neo-Marxist tendencies, the workbook tries to prime students to be political activists. They have a section called “taking a stand,” where they ask the students an escalating series of questions from what they would be willing to sign a petition about to what they would be willing to actively demonstrate about. The word “active” is doing some serious heavy lifting, as the previous question involved “peaceful demonstration.”15 The teacher’s guidebook explicitly states that the biblical view of justice is the “equalization of society.”16 But that’s not biblical justice at all! Biblical justice is about the gospel, and the gospel isn’t about equalization, though it’s certainly applicable to every human: It’s about redemption of a rebellious, sin-enslaved people to a holy God through his own sacrifice!17

The male guidebooks make a rather ham-fisted attempt to emasculate the boys. They have them sign a pledge of nonviolence that includes taking care of the environment and requiring them to avoid any forms of violent recreation.18 Such a pledge would require the boys to avoid boxing, wrestling, martial arts, rugby, Aussie Rules football, American football, hockey, and countless other competitive sports that boys are built to enjoy.

At an added level of inappropriateness, the curriculum directly discusses puberty, with the girls being asked questions about whether they have started menstruating and how that made them feel. It then asked them to discuss this with other female classmates.19 The guidebook also attempts to draw division between the sexes by focusing heavily on taboos formerly associated with menstruation,20 conditioning students to view women as victims of a patriarchal society. To do this, the guidebook pivots openly into social justice, explicitly using that term.21 At the bottom of the page, the mask fully slips off: “Period dignity is integral to achieving gender equity and is a fundamental human right.”22

Equity does not mean equality. It means adjusting shares of society to force everyone to be equal. But short of sterilizing all women or somehow hacking biology to make men have periods, equity around periods is impossible. Women have them, and there is nothing undignified about it; men don’t. It’s biology. But impossible goals make for committed activists because by definition, the goals cannot be achieved, and therefore, the activists who think they can be are tied to them for life.

The fact that the program presents menstruation and puberty as appropriate topics for teachers, rather than parents, to discuss is concerning. This is particularly concerning because they do not restrain themselves to “health class” levels of what is normal in development (which would still warrant a parent’s permission before the class), but they politicize the topic. They also spend pages asking students to look at how the media portrays men’s and women’s bodies, then they ask the students to write a letter or poem of appreciation to their bodies.23 And again, this is being used in many Christian schools!

Gender Ideology

All this runs highly contrary to the Bible, which makes it abundantly clear that God only made the two sexes, male and female, and that he crafts each person from their mother’s womb.

Even more shocking, the curriculum includes a section on “gender identity.” Rather than appealing to Genesis 1, “Male and female he created them,” it appeals to masculine and feminine stereotypes, while suggesting that “gender” might be learned rather than born.24 All this runs highly contrary to the Bible, which makes it abundantly clear that God only made the two sexes, male and female, and that he crafts each person from their mother’s womb. No one, therefore, is born in the wrong body. No one needs to try becoming something else. The teacher guide also explicitly acknowledges the category of “trans men” who might need period-related products.25

The workbook is more explicit later, when it presents the following statements to students and asks them to agree or disagree.

• Our society supports various ways of expressing gender diversity.
• I have a reasonable understanding of the various forms of sexual diversity and expression.
• The media supports diversity through showing a wide range of gender and sexual expression.
• I am accepting of various ways of expressing gender and sexuality.
• A person’s sexual orientation can change over their lifetime.
• I would know how to respond if a friend “came out” to me and told me they were gay.
• This school is a safe place for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex students.26

The students are then prompted to discuss their answers with the class. Such an exercise serves to break down dissenters. Students are forced to reveal their own opinions, opening themselves to class scorn if they vary from the approved party line. Given that these are young teenagers, many will feel extremely pressured to go along rather than take a public stand on God’s Word. Notably, the curriculum also encourages students who feel marginalized to contact LGBTQ+ support organizations.27

Included in the curriculum for boys and girls is the following paragraph:

The existence of people who are LGBTQI clearly shows that conditioning does not solely or finally determine us. The central understanding of alternate sexual identities is that people are born this way and it’s an essential part of who they are. If gender were not real, then transgender would not be real either along with all the other variations that exist despite society’s continual and oppressive pressure on us all to be the same.28

That statement is completely antithetical to the biblical understanding of sexuality and gender. There are no transgender people. There are many people who are confused about their gender, but there are no people who have biologically changed their gender. Further, this assumes that society somehow oppresses anyone who is confused about gender, despite corporations, governments, and society at large dedicating every June to celebrate this deviation from our Creator’s good design, which is better for every human being, created in his image, whether they acknowledge it or not.

The Rite Journey proceeds to dangle a big surprise in front of the students. They do not put the surprise in the children’s book, only in the teacher’s book. In keeping with the subversive nature of the book, the surprise is that the children wake up the next morning and find out they are the opposite sex.29 In what can only be described as grooming, they are then asked numerous questions about how that might feel and what they would do.

Feel Your Feelings?

The workbook also encourages students not to master their emotions but to live in them. According to the book, “Feelings don’t need to be fixed . . . they need to be felt.”30 The Bible says precisely the opposite: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9 KJV) and “As we tear down speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). You’d hope that Christian schools might be requiring a curriculum to be in line with the Bible. But in these respects, the curriculum teaches students that it’s okay to contradict the Bible to go along with culturally accepted messages.

Dealing with feelings, the curriculum sneaks Buddhism into Christianity with the concept of mindfulness.31 Mindfulness is basically a form of meditation where a person tries to detach from stressors and just be aware of how they are feeling. It’s a product of the Zen Buddhist tradition and has no place in Christianity.

The workbook then spends time discussing social media use. While some of the information in this section is relevant and helpful for children, the book veers into inappropriate discussions of explicit photos.32 Following this, the book discusses online influencers, asking the students to consider if the influencers they follow are inclusive.33 As a cultural buzzword, inclusive doesn’t usually mean making sure everyone is included. It means including people with the right (in other words, left) political opinions, while excluding everyone else. It would not be inclusive to say, for example, that sex outside a one man-one woman marriage is sin.

Inappropriate Content for Students

This is where I am going to ask anyone under 18 or sensitive to sexual violence to stop reading, given the explicit themes the rest of this article discusses from The Rite Journey. Keep in mind, this curriculum is being taught in private, conservative Christian schools to kids who may not have even hit puberty.

In the section meant for girls about boys, some of the questions they include for the girls to answer are about a male’s anatomy and emissions.34 They also encourage people to discuss sexual activities with children from the time they are toddlers!35

Remember, these are potentially prepubescent children. After giving them these overtly unnecessary sexual questions, the curriculum begins discussing relationships. Here, students are asked to list people they liked, loved, and lusted for.36 There is no condemnation of lust; it’s just expressed as something natural that people do. But the Bible contains repeated condemnations of lust. Jesus explicitly says that lust is the same as adultery (Matthew 5:28). And yet this curriculum being used in some Christian schools says zilch about that.

The workbook veers even further into inappropriate territory, talking about sex-ed. While some of these messages are helpful—for example, by telling girls that they can say no37—never once does the book refer to the foundational biblical standard of reserving sexuality for an exclusive husband-wife relationship. The book then follows up with another list of wildly inappropriate questions for young children including:

• What is your understanding of “consent”?
• Why is “enthusiastic consent” important?
• What is rape?
• What is “date rape”?38

Aside from the rampant age inappropriateness of the questions, what business do adults other than parents have asking kids about these questions and in secrecy? I suspect most parents would not be comfortable with this. The parents would certainly be uncomfortable with the extremely crude story contained on pages 200–201 about sexual acts between two underage kids.39 There are two other such stories in the guidebook, including one that explicitly involves rape.40 The boys guidebook includes a graphic description of circumcision.41 By swearing the kids to secrecy and involving their parents in other aspects of the program, The Rite Journey convinces kids and their parents that this all has parental approval and is somehow normal. Spoiler, it’s not.

The boys’ teacher guidebook includes the following paragraph, which would be wildly inappropriate in even a public school context.

For pre-adolescent boys, the messages that such reports convey about sex must be very unsettling. By thirteen or fourteen most boys have strong sexual feelings and a fascination with the images of women that are presented all around them. Their own sexual urges are really waking up. Boys at this age [pleasure themselves] at least once a day. Yet nothing positive is being done to honour this new part of their life. It’s often not even discussed.42

The curriculum goes on to claim that this is simply normal male behavior,43 rather than condemning the lust behind it as Jesus did. Again, this is supposed to be the Christian version of the guidebook.

The Bible explicitly gives instructions to parents, not random outsiders or schoolteachers, on how to raise their children.

They also include a section on sexual harassment and abusive behavior. Some of this is good, though not age appropriate, but they include things that are a matter of interpretation. For example, under sexually abusive behavior, they include looks and mental fantasies.44 Now obviously, there are creeps who can look at or fantasize about someone in ways that are inappropriate, but we must exercise discernment in determining what is, for example, a mere glance or lustful or harmful intent. At a fundamental level, this curriculum inserts itself between parent and child, attempting to do the parents’ job for them. The Bible explicitly gives instructions to parents, not random outsiders or schoolteachers, on how to raise their children. Many of the topics are wildly inappropriate for the age and should be introduced by parents, not adults who have known the student for a few weeks. Ultimately, it is up to the parents what the child should learn and how their path to adulthood should be guided. Any stranger who wants to take that responsibility from you should be viewed with extreme skepticism. Parents and Christian school administrators should ask why they are doing it, what they hope to gain, and if they are aligned with your theological and cultural values. The Rite Journey, though used in Christian schools, has no mention of Christ or the Bible anywhere in their workbook and only passing, theoretical mentions of God. Rather than trusting the discernment of these Christian schools using it as indicating this being appropriate in schools at all, much less other Christian schools, parents need to be aware that when they send their children to Christian schools, programs like these may indeed be discipling their children but not with a biblical worldview.

Even if your school is not using The Rite Journey, it may be using one that teaches similar ideology. Parents, it’s your responsibility to know what your child is being taught.