Good for Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey for insisting that her state’s teacher preparation materials for early-childhood education not focus on “woke” obsessions about race and gender.

When Ivey was shown materials from the National Association for the Education of Young Children, an accrediting agency whose work is being used as a basis for Alabama education, she was appalled and ordered the NAEYC materials pulled . In short order, Ivey accepted the resignation of her director of the state Department of Early Childhood Education, Barbara Cooper.

The specific NAEYC publication at issue, the fourth edition of its Developmentally Appropriate Practice Book, makes only some of its materials available online, and when ordered as an e-book, it arrived but, for some reason, could not be opened (by my computer.) Enough of the overall NAEYC agenda, though, is available online to get a sense of why it is objectionable.

Again, these materials are for teaching preschool children. We’re not talking about high schoolers with a fair amount of lived experience. Even for children in K-4, NAEYC teaches that “silence” about gender and race “issues” has a “hurtful power.” It says teachers should “build trusting relationships with children by directly talking about identity, diversity, injustice, and activism .”

Seriously? That alone should be enough to jettison NAEYC. Full stop.

What makes preschool teachers experts at talking to children about topics so fraught with meaning and controversy? How in tarnation is it even acceptable to have preschool teachers discuss “activism” with young children? Why should anybody but the parents or the parents’ specifically chosen designees “hold clarifying conversations about anti-bias issues” with four-year-olds?

Those examples above actually come from a separate NAEYC publication called “ Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, Second Edition.” But all the NAEYC publications cross-reference each other, and all are part of the agenda being pushed. The book to which Ivey objected endorses in their entirety the (misnamed) “anti-bias and anti-racism education” otherwise promoted by NAEYC. It specifically says it “builds” on “five foundational doctrines,” one of which is “advancing equity in early childhood education” — with “equity” naturally meaning the leftist ideals of “social justice” and equal results rather than equal opportunity.

Specifically, the preface of the Developmentally Appropriate Practice Book insists that teachers operate within and must counteract “a broader societal context of inequities in which implicit and explicit bias are pervasive.” It says the authors of the book were greatly affected by “the murder of George Floyd” (by Minneapolis police) and the “Black Lives Matter movement” that highlighted “structural inequities.”

And that doesn’t even get into the NAEYC’s highly tendentious adoption of the full leftist panoply of assumptions about the supposedly fluid, non-binary nature of gender and their insistence on teaching young children in ways promoting acceptance of such fluidity. It’s all there, emphasized repeatedly in NAEYC publications this Practice Book endorses.

This is outlandish. Ivey is right to say it is all “divisive at the core.” This radical agenda has no place in preschool, where it’s tough enough just to start teaching children socialization skills and the early rudiments of reading and arithmetic.

As the preface itself notes, most of this woke nonsense is new since the publication’s third edition. It’s not as if conservatives such as Ivey are suddenly attacking long-accepted practices. Instead, the Left is using radical new ideas to attack existing social structures and using children as pawns to do so. Ivey and company are defenders, not aggressive culture warriors.

Yet now that the battle is joined, those who radically attack children’s natural innocence are the ones who must, quite decisively, lose the war.