It’s not for schools to parent our children

When I try to remember what I was taught in sex education, all I can dredge up is a mental image of a plastic model uterus in bubblegum pink, complete with Velcro-on ovaries. Of course, that was back when sex education was basically biology. We didn’t go into issues affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender pupils, what constitutes harassment or discuss how to stay safe from online predators. We didn’t have to. And, as a subject, SE certainly didn’t have the “Relationships and…” prefix it does now (RSE), the assumption being that, aided by your parents, you could probably navigate that more nuanced, delicate and impossible-to-teach side of life yourself.

Today, nothing is too nuanced, delicate or unteachable not to be offloaded on to those most overworked and underpaid of public servants: teachers.

Just this week, the Church of England stated – in response to the Government’s recent consultation on what should be included in the RSE curriculum – that pupils should be taught abstinence and celibacy as “positive life choices”, that there is “diversity in sexual desire”, and that “trust, loyalty, fidelity and the Christian understanding of marriage” are generally a good context for sexual relationships.

Now I wholeheartedly support the basic morality behind the Church of England’s statements, posted on a blog by chief education officer, the Reverend Nigel Genders. And to prove that support, I won’t even make fun of his on-message surname.

But there’s a problem: alongside teaching teenagers not to act on every hormonal impulse the second they have one (and good luck with that), schools have also been called upon to teach children “resilience”, “feminism”, “employability skills”, “the dangers of sexting”, “being in-tune with your mental health”, “meditation”, “how to be happy” and “the importance of masturbation” (arguably, most kids will get to grips with this in their own good time). And that’s just since the start of 2018.

Scroll back a bit further, to 2017, and you’ll find that “healthy eating skills” and “civility” also recur endlessly as subjects that should be squeezed into the national school curriculum. And one does see the dilemma: how else are these key precepts going to be instilled in children? If only there were a set of people – all you’d really need is two – whose single job it was to say “Eat your greens”, “What’s the magic word?”, “Don’t give up at the first hurdle”, “Please don’t sleep with the first boy/girl/gender neutral person who goes by an entirely nongrammatical plural pronoun that comes along” and “Always use protection”. Oh, wait a second, there is: parents.

When did our parental muscles get so flaccid? I know why – through sheer lack of use – but when did we start deferring every basic responsibility to schools and the state? Just last year, a note posted by one school on Facebook went viral. “Magic words such as ‘Hello’, ‘Please’, ‘You’re welcome’, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Thank you’, all begin to be learned at home,” it pointed out to parents. “It’s also at home that children learn to be honest, to be on time, diligent, show friends their sympathy, as well as show utmost respect for their elders and all teachers. Here at school, on the other hand, we teach language, maths, history, geography, physics, sciences and physical education. We only reinforce the education that children receive at home from their parents.”

Obviously, it wasn’t a British school that posted the note, but a Portuguese one. We’re too busy apologising for our hopelessly outdated belief system here in Blighty to make any kind of a robust retort; too intent on tearing down the old-fashioned morality that was built up over the European Renaissance and erecting a new PC edict that, hilariously, then ties us up in terrible knots when parents start withdrawing their children from these new, progressive RSE classes “for faith-based reasons”.

And one can’t quite shake the feeling that so much of the PC propaganda being put forward in the classroom is more about preaching to the parents through the child than anything else. Because parents are almost seen as the guilty party now, with schools fighting against what’s being taught, or not taught, at home.

Perhaps in our dislocated, secular society, that is understandable. With divorce rates skyrocketing and the sense of family and community once provided by the church no longer there, we’re asking teachers to turn their classrooms into safe havens – part confessionals, part therapist’s offices – where all the finer moral distinctions of life can be ironed out.

But that will never be possible, and it’s certainly not possible in a country where 5.1million adults have literacy levels at or below those expected of an 11-year-old child; a country where numeracy skills are declining at a startling rate, year on year.

And who knows? It might be an idea to let the teachers concentrate on teaching reading, writing and maths before they embark on the murky depths of “gender identity” and “self-worth”. If, as a parent, you feel very strongly about those things, you could even have a stab at them yourself.