Don’t pull out, abstain
From May 4 to 8, thousands of parents across Ontario intend to pull their children out of schools in protest of the province’s new sexual education curriculum. The movement, called “Save Our Children: The New Ontario Sex Education Curriculum Is Not Age Appropriate,” has so far attracted nearly 8,000 people on Facebook, mostly from the Greater Toronto Area.
Their concerns about the new curriculum, to be introduced in September, range from legitimate disagreements over values to feverish anxieties caused by outright misinformation. There are indeed some aspects of the new curriculum that won’t go over well with parents trying to raise their children according to traditional or religious teachings. The suggestion that individuals might self-identify as one of six genders — a notion introduced in Grade 8 — is one example. Another is the discussion of anal and oral sex — albeit, within the framework of preventing sexually transmitted infections — in Grade 7, or same-sex relationships, to be discussed in Grade 3.
Then there are the supposed components of the curriculum that can’t actually be found in any of the document’s 244 pages. They include the notion that “male and female genders are presented as insufficient,” as purported by certain pamphlets and flyers being circulated by “Save Our Children” parents. One letter, which is being circulated in Arabic, says that Grade 1 students “will learn to touch (their) private area and identify it on themselves and others.” It also contends that Grade 6 students “will be asked in class to explore his or her own body by touching their private parts, masturbating and pleasuring their body.” The most extreme suggestion in the pamphlet is that Grade 8 students will learn something akin to “Anal Play 101,” and that they will be “asked to look at sexy magazines and movies.”
These suggestions, needless to say, are utterly false, and have been confirmed as such by Education Minister Liz Sandals. But that doesn’t seem to matter to some Ontario parents, who have opted to get their information from Facebook posts and pamphlets rather than from the document itself. But for those who have read the curriculum and are still uncomfortable with it, there are options available to them: namely, to withdraw their children from sex ed classes. While exemption procedures vary by board, most schools across Ontario will offer alternate assignments to students whose parents object to their participation.
That makes immeasurably more sense than pulling students out of all classes for an entire week. Indeed, what does missing math class have to do with protesting the more contentious aspects of a sexual education curriculum that hasn’t even yet been implemented? Such a “strike” will make little difference to a government that has repeatedly emphasized its commitment to the new curriculum; the only individuals who will be affected by this action will be the students forced to make up for a week’s worth of lessons. Parents should keep their kids in school, and find some other way to make their point.