If you had told me at the end of last year that the first major public debate of 2026 in Luxembourg would be about toilets… honestly, I would have believed you because, at this point, the world has become a rather absurd spectacle indeed.
Before I go any further, I want to make clear that I will not be discussing whether LGBTQIA+ topics belong in schools. I’m sorry, but I am simply not willing to give this complete non-issue any more attention than it has already received. If your worldview is so fragile that it cannot stand even a simple encounter with what is the lived reality for millions around the globe, and has been since the dawn of humanity, then I’m sorry to tell you, but the problem is not the queer community.
Now that that’s over with, there is one aspect of this debate that does deserve our attention: the warped idea some people appear to have about what education even is.
As part of this utter farce we have been subjected to recently, we have heard from those who are “concerned”. What are they concerned about? That their children might encounter this ominous force known as ‘LGBTQIA’, made all the scarier by news articles still insisting on putting it in quotes as if it were some strange foreign concept? That they might learn about lives different from their own? That they might learn to articulate part of their own experience that is only just starting to emerge?
Interestingly, the arguments not based on outright queerphobia are even more bizarre. Some of these “concerned” people tell us that they do, in fact, believe these issues should be discussed in schools, but that it should be done in an “age-appropriate way” and not “dominate” the entire curriculum. My sibling in Christ, you can take your straw man and throw it on the pile during the next Buergbrennen because literally not a single person has ever suggested anything else.
One thing comes up again and again in this debate, and it gives me great cause for concern: parents declaring that they want to “have a say” in what their children are taught. Worse still, teachers give in to pressure from those same parents and change their curricula to bend to their will. This leads me to observe that we are dealing with a fundamental misunderstanding of the very concept of education.
To be fair to those I’m critiquing, I can understand why they would be so confused. The education system most of us went through was – and remains – quite far removed from what actual education entails. Who doesn’t have more or less traumatic memories of despotic teachers rattling off a bunch of material with the contemptuous arrogance that only years of academia could instil in a human being, calling anyone who did not instantly follow an “idiot” or a “slacker”? I’m only approaching my 30th birthday this year, and even I encountered many such “teachers” during my time in school.
This antiquated form of schooling has become pejoratively known as the “banking” method. It is based on the idea that there is a big, predefined stack of information, and the teacher’s job is to stick some funnels into their students’ heads and shove it all in there. This approach could not be further from actual education. As Paulo Freire noted in his seminal 1968 work Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information.”
Education, when done right, should make you question things, especially the presuppositions you may have developed and/or inherited. And it should make you uncomfortable. When I was in school, we had a philosophy teacher who almost made it his personal mission to poke at the foundations of the worldview we had built for ourselves up to that point. Whenever someone articulated an opinion, he scrutinised it and sometimes all it took was a single, laser-targeted question to make the whole thing collapse like a house of cards. I loved his classes.
This type of teaching – what Freire calls “liberating education” – crucially also involves a sort of self-reflection on the parts of the students and the teacher because it recognises its own subjective involvement in the matter. In On Critical Pedagogy, Canadian scholar Henry Giroux notes, “critical pedagogy illuminates how classroom learning embodies selective values, is entangled with relations of power, entails judgments about what knowledge counts, legitimates specific social relations, defines agency in particular ways, and always presupposes a particular notion of the future.”
While many claim to support education, rigorous analysis consistently reveals that they fear actual education. They fear ambiguity and the scepticism that challenges seemingly conventional notions. They don’t actually want schools to teach students critical thinking. Instead, they yearn for the patriarchal slamming of the fist that establishes a clear framework and hierarchy. Commenting on this attitude during a discussion on the preface of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, theorist Ryan Engley once remarked pointedly: “Certainty, even if it is wrong, […] is valued over […] truth.”
Education should encourage enquiry and equip students with the tools to continually question authority. Because authority must never go unchallenged; it must always justify itself. And yes, that includes parental authority. To those who declare that their children should only be taught what they personally deem acceptable, I say that what you are thinking of is not education. It is indoctrination.
The late, great bell hooks said it best in Teaching To Transgress: “Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.” In its best iteration, this is what school should be for students.
Let kids learn about the world in peace, and stop trying to impose your biases on them. This may come as a shock to some, but children are not carbon copies of their parents. They are their own people. One of the best things you can do for them is equip them with the skills to encounter any situation with curiosity and critical thinking because then they will be able to handle anything life might throw at them.
Otherwise, who knows, they might start a senseless national debate about toilets someday. And that would be very silly now, wouldn’t it?
