Following Labour Minister Yiannis Panayiotou’s backtracking after being rebuked by the President – when he admitted his mistake in calling out APOEL football club over the millions it and other teams owe to the state – Education Minister Athena Michaelidou has now adopted a similar approach.
The terms “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” that appeared on the student registration platform were, according to her, merely a technical error. “
We’re surprised to see a purely technical matter being blown up into an entire philosophy complete with conspiracy theories”, the minister stated, emphasising that the information requested by the registration platform has no connection to gender identity philosophies or anything similar.
Nothing to do with a woke agenda, she said in subsequent statements, introducing the contemporary “problem” into the discussion while reassuring conservative and far-right voters that the government harbours no such agenda.
The reference to “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” was promptly deleted and replaced with “User 1” and “User 2”. And thus, by placating the masses, we sidestep the thorny issues.
But what exactly is this “woke agenda” that strikes such fear if someone associates with it? Professor Haridimos Tsoukas explains in an article that the term comes from the informal use of “woken”, the passive participle of “wake”, and was first employed by African American intellectuals in the early decades of the 20th century.
It gained broader usage through the activist call, initially in songs and theatrical works, to “stay woke”.
“In essence”, writes Tsoukas, “being ‘woke’ today means having awareness of injustices, both present and historical, particularly regarding race, gender and sexuality… If you aspire to be a consistent liberal democrat, you’re obliged to stay vigilant – to be woke. To question whether our laws and their implementation reflect our values, whether our reasonable desires for prosperity and security overshadow our will to be moral beings, whether we treat those outside the mainstream fairly, whether the inevitable (and necessary) power relationships between us impede universal wellbeing”.
Being woke, therefore, isn’t a sin but rather a responsibility.
Using “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” in government documents, instead of mother and father, has no bearing on the fundamentals of education or society’s principles and values.
And the minister, who remains popular (at least for now), could have explained this rather than rushing to claim it was a technical error.
