Don’t set Ontario back
Doug Ford says that if he’s elected premier in June he will scrap the province’s two-year-old sex-education curriculum and start from scratch. “We have to make sure we tweak a few things,” said the newly minted leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives, though he won’t say what exactly needs tweaking. That’s beside the point, he insists; the real issue is that parents weren’t consulted.
This ubiquitous claim has haunted the sex-ed curriculum from its earliest days. Indeed, loud gripes about a failure to consult killed Queen’s Park’s previous attempt to update the course in 2010. But as Premier Kathleen Wynne said this week, the contention that parents were not consulted is “just not true.”
The main sex-ed curriculum was studied and developed over eight years. The government consulted hundreds of psychologists, police, educators and religious bodies, including more than 4,000 parents from elementary schools across the province, before giving it the goahead.
So how, if so many parents were consulted, did the process yield such an unpopular curriculum? Simply, it didn’t.
While of course some parents do strongly oppose the course, the impression of overwhelming opposition was largely created by right-wing organizations such as the Institute of Canadian Values and REAL Women of Canada, which made a lot of noise in their effort to promote unfounded myths about what students will actually be taught.
In reality, most parents do want sex education in the schools. Some 90 per cent of Ontarians thought the old sex-ed course needed updating and, at the time it was introduced, a majority supported the new curriculum. And the experts agree. Among backers of the sex-ed course are organizations such as the Institute for Catholic Education, the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada and the Ontario Public Health Association.
No wonder. In 1998, when the previous curriculum was brought in, gay marriage was illegal, there were no smartphones, the word “sexting” hadn’t been invented and the important debate around consent was not yet mainstream. The previous course included no mention of cyber-bullying, now a widespread phenomenon, or gender identity, about which we have learned a great deal over the last decade. The world has changed and sex has changed with it. It would be irresponsible if our pedagogy did not keep up.
Some of the curriculum’s opponents argue that sex education is a moral issue and thus the rightful purview, not of schools, but of parents. But of course this ignores that most parents today want help to prepare their children for sex in the digital age. And it ignores, too, that the curriculum does not in fact seek to impose a moral point of view, but rather to cover matters of human rights and public health, issues that fall squarely within the mandate of public education.
The anger in certain corners over the curriculum seems in truth to have less to do with the province’s failure to consult than with the failure of the consultation’s outcome to reflect the views of the aggrieved. But of course public consultation can’t guarantee that everyone will be happy. On an issue as fraught and divisive as this one, the only guarantee is that a minority will be upset. Sometimes that’s the best democracy can do.
The people and the evidence have spoken. The Wynne government was right two years ago to bring sex education into the 21st century. It would be a shame if Doug Ford, in the name of democracy, subverted the democratic will and took away a tool our children need to navigate the modern world.
It would be a shame if Doug Ford subverted the democratic will and took away a tool our children need to navigate the modern world