Edward Keenan

We’re not doing our kids any favours by turning back the clock,

I was a student in Toronto schools in the 1980s and 1990s. I remember the good old days of sex education — to which my own children and others of the current generation will be returning after Doug Ford’s government scrapped the new-ish curriculum.

Let me tell you about the good old days.

We learned about anatomy and sexuality primarily through graphic porno magazines passed quietly around the schoolyard (procured from whoknows-where).

I was unclear on how the mechanics worked before about Grade 5 or 6 and, frankly, I’m not sure, in retrospect, that a copy of “Double Stuffed Blondes” was the best way to dispel my ignorance.

My Grade 8 class had, I think, 14 students in it.

At least two of them became parents before they started high school. Was this new? Not exactly. My extended family was not alone in having aunts and uncles who had been married as teenagers months before a baby was due.

No one in my high schools was openly gay or lesbian or bisexual or trans, but some students suspected of being gay were viciously, relentlessly bullied and constantly, casually mocked, even by people they called friends.

Our teachers often put on comedy skits during assemblies in which the punchlines were often that someone might be gay or was making a homosexual pass at someone else.

I have lost count of the number of friends I know who told me of being sexually assaulted by older children and adults, and often they did not know what to do about it, or even if there was anything they could do about it.

Mostly they thought they had a secret — something they’d participated in that they needed to make sure no responsible adult found out about. Ah, the good old days. I could go on and on.

It’s not a coincidence, I don’t think, that the very things many parents most fear their children will learn about from teachers in school are the things earlier generations learned about the hard way — not in the classroom, but in the street, or the schoolyard, or (worst of all) in the bedroom. Often with life-altering, sometimes scarring, results. Our desire to preserve our children’s innocence backfires when they don’t know enough to protect themselves from their own curiosity and emotions, or from their peers, or from predators.

Times have changed, too, whether people want to admit it or not. In 1998, when the curriculum the government is reverting to was written, samesex marriage wasn’t even legal yet. It had only been one year since Ellen DeGeneres’ announcement she was gay had been one of the most controversial entertainment events of the decade. Trans people were largely made invisible, and were, in any case, widely ignored or shunned.

In 1998, somehow, you could write a whole sexuality curriculum and not think of covering the concept of “consent.” Of course, in the 1990s, the idea that “date rape” was rape at all was still a relatively new, and hotly debated, concept.

In 1998, there was barely any internet — and Google was a brand new company.

Children today learn to search online for research about all kinds of things — I fear for the child who is curious about the unfamiliar term “anal sex” (perhaps after hearing a conservative politician shout about it in a debate about education) and sees “XVideos” or “Pornhub” as a top Google result on that query. In 1998, there were no smartphones and no social media, and therefore no ways for unwelcome nude photos to be sent or traded, no way for bullies to follow you around with their abuse, fewer places for predators to communicate with you alone.

Things have changed, in many ways for the better. But, if the sex education of onceupon-a-time left us unprepared even back then, it doesn’t even touch on much of the world kids encounter today. It’s as if we were teaching children how to change a typewriter ribbon and hoping it would help prepare them to write video game code.

It is true, undeniably, that there are many thousands of parents out there who have concerns about the updated sex-ed curriculum. Shelley Carroll, on a radio panel Thursday morning, said she had lost her bid as a Liberal for a seat in the provincial legislature this spring as a direct result of anger over this issue.

When I have tried to look at the curriculum to see what is causing that concern, I have not found the things opponents claim are in it. But that doesn’t mean they are less angry. That political anger needs to be addressed somehow; it’s not healthy to have huge groups of parents who are enraged at their children’s schools. But for the life of me, I cannot understand why you wouldn’t isolate the areas that have been controversial and look again at those areas directly. Either defuse the fear and anger or tweak the specific points of contention. Why throw out the whole thing, with all its much-needed preparation for the world?

You can’t turn turn back the clock. And I don’t see why you’d want to.