Last month we got a notice from our child’s school declaring that the unit on Human Development and Sexual Health would be taught in June. The purpose of the note was to give parents the chance to opt out of this part of the curriculum. Opt out, as in not participate, and not learn the information laid out in this section of the curriculum.
A few years ago, the sex ed curriculum was updated in an attempt to address current issues in age-appropriate ways. The changes included teaching the correct names for body parts, discussing consent and communication, discouraging all forms of bullying, including bullying around gender identity or sexual orientation, and introducing ways to keep oneself safe during various sexual acts (beginning, I believe, in grade six). It explicitly taught students to discuss the issues with family or trusted adult members of their communities, encouraged delaying sexual acts, and included respecting family values as one part of a healthy decision-making process.
There was a general uproar from many sectors of the community. People were outraged that children as young as six would be taught that there are differences between boys and girls and be given words to describe the parts. Really? Most six-year-olds don’t know about this difference already? And shouldn’t ALL children be able to communicate about every part of their bodies as soon as they can speak? People were outraged that children would be taught that there were alternatives to being straight (despite homosexuality being a protected class in Canada). People were outraged that middle school students would learn about various sexual acts they might encounter. Some groups were even suggesting that students would be practising oral sex in class. Come on, people. Turn your brains back on.
I understand that these are sensitive topics, and that different people have different values around the discussions involved, but I’m not convinced those values should prevail over either the laws of our country or the individual right of children to keep themselves safe from harm (including unwanted pregnancy, STDs and abuse or assault).
But aside from my own beliefs about the importance of a comprehensive sex ed program, I’m confused about why this one aspect of the curriculum is optional when others are not. I mean, if we’ve decided that it’s important for kids to learn, then shouldn’t it be mandatory, just like all the other topics we’ve deemed compulsory? What if someone decided they didn’t want their child to learn fractions? Gravity? How about Black history? What if someone felt that their child, who struggles in math and spatial sense, was at risk for low self-esteem by being forced to take transformational geometry. I mean, really, do most adults need to know how to find the tangent to a circle?
To be honest, I have all kinds of objections to the curriculum as it is currently taught. I’m not saying I agree with making everyone learn everything. I AM saying that if we’ve decided that curriculum is fixed, and we’ve decided that sex ed is an important part of child development, then why can people opt their children out of that but not other parts of the curriculum? As a functional adult, how often do you need to recall the parts of a flower or the conditions which produce igneous rock? How often do you translate and then dilate a quadrilateral polygon? This is elementary school, folks, not even high school. All children are expected to learn this stuff. As an adult, I use none of those, except when I teach them. Now think about how often you need skills to communicate your needs, to politely decline invitations or advances, to decide what you are and are not comfortable doing? How many teens and adults are navigating issues of gender identity, sexual orientation, dating, and bullying? How many parents don’t know how to support their children in safe-sex talks?
As a parent, what ranks higher on your list of fears for your daughter – that she won’t be able to parse a sentence or that she will end up engaging in something she would rather not have but didn’t have words to communicate? How about fears for your son? Higher that he won’t be able to classify triangles or that he might be wrongly accused of sexual assault? The sex ed curriculum is designed to address these issues, as well as bullying, teen pregnancy, and gender identity. The children whose parents will refuse to have them participate in these lessons are often the ones who most need the information. And believe me, they’re getting it anyway, just from way less credible sources. Instead of learning about the myriad pitfalls that can befall teens and young adults from teachers and parents, they are learning from peers, from the internet, and from finding themselves in dangerous situations. And the information they’re getting isn’t always accurate or safe.
To those who believe we are teaching things too early, I can tell you that in junior high (grade 6-8), many students are already engaging in various sexual acts. A few years ago, our school superintendent shared that she was dealing with multiple elementary school girls who were giving blowjobs for money in the school cafeteria. I don’t work in a particularly rough neighbourhood, and this was not considered outside the range of normal. That’s concerning, and requires education so that kids learn about the risks of their behaviour and alternatives to engaging in these kinds of activities at such a young age.
In the end, a new government was elected and the curriculum was scrapped, pending community consultation. Again, I’m confused by this concept. The math curriculum has changed multiple times in my twenty years of teaching, and I don’t remember ever hearing about community consultation. The decisions were made by experts in the field of education and math. Why are we expecting parents to make decisions around the health curriculum?
Moreover, schools are where unpopular changes have always occurred. Think about racism. For years, society believed that education should be segregated, but that seems ludicrous now. We did not wait for all of the stakeholders to be ‘on board’ before desegregating schools. Racism was being taught at home and education was one way to counter that. In my lifetime, it has always been inappropriate to use the n-word, but when my parents and their parents were in school, that wasn’t the case. Nowadays, we hear kids on the playground calling each other ‘faggot’ or complaining that things are ‘gay.’ This will not change until we teach them to do better, and those changes are hard to get at home. We must educate kids before they pick up those habits and before they become victim to bullying or assault, so that they have the tools they need when the time comes to protect themselves and each other.
A new health curriculum has since been approved, with a clause about opting out of the unit on Human Development and Sexual Health. This is not just another subject. These are crucial life skills. This seems like the one unit kids should NOT be able to opt out of. We talk about the importance of mental health for children, but we protect the rights of parents to shield their kids from the very tools we’ve created to bolster that. Who would choose to opt out of information designed to keep their kids safe from abuse, assault, or injury? As a society, we owe it to our children to step in when they need help. At the very least, I think opting out of this unit should prompt a conversation with parents about the broader issues of childhood well-being.
Out of the Well 