Lessons our kids need to learn
Critics may not yet have said that the Ontario government’s decision to drop the province’s updated sex curriculum will kill children, but they have come close.
The buzz phrases have been that abandoning the curriculum “puts kids at risk,” and teachers ought to keep teaching the curriculum to “keep kids safe.” There is a blog post on the Huffington Post Canada headlined “The New Sex-Ed Curriculum Would Have Saved Me From Torment Growing Up,” and activist Glen Canning, whose teenage daughter Reteah Parsons committed suicide after an alleged sex assault, told VICE that getting rid of the curriculum will lead to more sexual assaults of children.
There are good intentions and genuine concern behind the collective flip-out over ditching the 2015 curriculum. But that doesn’t change the fact that the reaction is sad and misguided.
I have no major problems with the updated curriculum. I am not concerned with my children being taught it — I presume they already have been taught it — and though I haven’t revisited the “new” curriculum in a few years since the uproar when it was first released, my memory is of being surprised by how mundane it seemed, given all the fuss.
But the idea that this curriculum — and only this curriculum — is the difference between LGBTQ people being viciously persecuted and being respected as human beings is ridiculous.
Accepting people for who they are is a lesson that should permeate homes and schools beyond this particular instance. If it doesn’t, a handful of lines in a mandated subject-specific curriculum is going to be of marginal usefulness at best. There’s nothing wrong with the handful of lines; it’s just that they should be recognized for what they are: a drop in the bucket.
The same is true when it comes to the new curriculum teaching kids about consent. It’s not a bad idea; it’s just that it barely scratches the surface. What understanding consent really comes down to — in all areas of life — is being instilled with a deep, abiding, and authentic respect for other human beings. God bless your children’s Grade 5 teacher, but isn’t that a little much to expect of her? And to the extent she can help in this area, it’s going to be based on her own wisdom and sensitivity, not a provincial health lesson plan.
Those who are losing it over the government dropping the updated curriculum, and those who have until recently been losing it over the government not dropping the updated curriculum, share one thing in common: they all live in a fantasy world where whatever is on the curriculum becomes what real kids actually know, understand and believe.
I’m not sure if that world would be a utopia or a nightmare. But it doesn’t exist. Long division is also on the curriculum yet plenty of kids forget how to do it a few years after being taught it, assuming they ever master it at all. In instances where abstinence has been on the curriculum, teens have had sex anyway.
Yet, Ontario’s sex ed curriculum is discussed as though whatever it does or doesn’t say will determine exactly how kids behave … and is therefore a matter of life or death.
No curriculum can dictate who a kid will become — and that’s OK. It would be creepy if it could. This reality emphasizes, though, that how our kids end up treating each other is a matter so much bigger than school.
“As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is,” the late children’s television host Mr. (Fred) Rogers said. “That each of us has something that no one else has — or ever will have — something inside that is unique to all time.”
The job Mr. Rogers describes is momentous. It takes love, friendship, struggle, patience, spirituality, courage, understanding and time, among countless other ingredients.
The more people do this job well, the more the world will look the way I think the critics of dropping the updated sex-ed curriculum — and indeed most of us — would like the world to look.
But learning to do this job well has to take place in so many arenas, with so many interactions, and in so many ways.
If a piece of Ontario’s sex ed curriculum helps, that’s great, and yet it’s also almost beside the point. Respecting the dignity of other people is something kids learn through so many channels more influential and meaningful than a mandated course of study.
If they don’t, then that’s the real reason we should all be flipping out. And the real thing we should be clamouring to change.
I HAVE NO MAJOR PROBLEMS WITH THE UPDATED CURRICULUM.