Ontario’s Sex Ed Curriculum: Standard Stuff Or A Montrous Manifesto?

There is much controversy over the new Ontario Sex Education curriculum, which we are told has led to 2000 children being removed from the school system out of fears that they will perverted by this ostensibly monstrous manifesto of social engineering. It would be genuinely funny if it weren’t so very sad. I have now covered three protests against the sex ed programme and I can assure you that most of those demonstrating certainly haven’t read the thing and are being fed false or horribly out-of-context statements from the document.

I have read it, and it’s not much fun. Almost 250 pages long, a lot is about not smoking, not doing drugs, eating vegetables and keeping fit. The good bits? Pretty standard stuff really. It acknowledges that some children feel as if their physical bodies do not represent their psychological and sexual feelings and realizes that, whether parents approve or not, anal and oral sex do take place. It’s more discussion than indoctrination and the reaction has been hysterical, with people who make a fetish out of their fears dominating the conversation. One allegation, for example, is that disgraced former senior public servant Benjamin Levin was behind the curriculum. That’s mere propaganda. In fact the curriculum is pretty standard stuff and similar systems operate throughout Western Europe. Levin is merely a convenient and repugnant digression.

The other aspect of all this is Kathleen Wynne’s sexuality. Every time an opponent of the curriculum claims that the Premier’s lesbianism is irrelevant and that the objections have nothing to do with homophobia the nose of that bloody puppet Pinocchio extends another inch. Anti-LGBTQ feelings permeate all of this, drench the reaction and infect the reactions of the people withdrawing their children from school. They seem convinced that if their kids receive a modern sex education they will either become chronic masturbators or gay activists. Goodness, we couldn’t even get ours to do their math homework!

Quite a few of those parents who have withdrawn their children are Muslim and are using on-line and Skype classes directly from Pakistan, which is a country where a strict blasphemy law is enforced and secular, gay and Christian Pakistanis are regularly persecuted and worse. Very worrying indeed.

Some of the Christian children being withdrawn are being sent to private Christian schools but they aren’t cheap and, anyway, not always sufficiently religiously rigorous for the objecting parents. So instead there are parents who opt for homeschooling, which is often problematic in itself.

The other tragedy here is that to a very large degree the last people who should be homeschooling are homeschoolers. While there are secular, anti-state types who do it, the majority is ultra-religious and mainly conservative Roman Catholic or right-wing evangelical Christian. Some are relatively mainline but many embrace grotesque theories about the dangers of vaccination, the threat of public education and the evils of modern society. They are often homophobic, generally sexually puritanical and some reject evolution and even hold to the world being 6000 years old. This is not a recipe for a well-adjusted, well-formed young person.

Legally, parents have a right to withdraw their children from school as long as they can prove that an alternative and adequate education is being offered. That’s not particularly difficult and it’s common for the authorities to hardly even check. The problem, however, is not how much history, geography or literature they know but how do they regard those who are different.

So from a mild and long overdue reform of Ontario’s school sex education there has been an empowerment of fundamentalist education and of a homeschooling community that rejects not only the change in teaching but much of what modern Canada represents and reflects. It doesn’t promise well for anybody concerned and it’s likely to get worse rather than better.