Explicit sex education program planned for Ontario

National Post editorial board: Explicit sex education program planned for Ontario

Editorial

Ontario is poised to inaugurate a new and explicit sex education curriculum in September. According to a detailed outline posted on the Ministry of Education’s website in January, children in Grade 3 will for the first time learn about “invisible differences” between people, including those of gender identity and sexual orientation, while Grade 6 and 7 students will receive information about “vaginal lubrication” and “anal intercourse.”

Reaction to the initiative from a “family-focused” coalition upholding traditional Judeo-Christian sexual morality was predictably, and fiercely, combative. “[Y]ou’re talking about a very personal and sensitive area and dealing with kids so young I believe that it will end up infringing on their thought processes and their desires and ability to make correct choices,” said Reverend Ekron Malcolm, director of the Institute for Canadian Values.

Unpacked, Reverend Malcolm’s allusions to “thought processes” and “ability to make correct choices” reflect social conservatives’ fears that a too-early introduction to sexuality of all kinds, particularly to the phenomenon of homosexuality, may negatively impact a child’s normal sexual development.

That the most active resistance to the program comes from the Christian right should not distract thoughtful secularists from the fact that the program is objectionable on purely rational grounds that have nothing to do with homophobia.

You don’t have to be religious to recognize the incompatibility of early instruction around sexuality with, dare we say it, the “settled” science around the “latency period” of childhood. In this schema, the second sexual phase in children following infancy and early childhood, from the age of six to twelve, is a period in which direct sexual energies fall dormant. During this phase, the child gathers his inner resources and develops mental and physical strength for entry to young adulthood. Only at adolescence do hormonal changes create the appropriate psychological context for absorbing ideas about “gender identity” and sexual ethics in a meaningful light. Until that time schools should butt out of sex education.

Latency-period researchers explain that it is precisely because children are not dominated by sexualized thinking between early childhood and adolescence that they are optimally attuned to, and most highly educable in, the areas crucial to cultural self-realization: Readin’, Writin’ and ‘Rithmetic.

Bending children’s imagination in a sexualized direction they would not naturally take distracts them from the work they should be devoting themselves to, and raises fears in social conservatives, possibly well-founded – for these are very uncharted waters, whatever liberal theorists may say – that the curricula will promote early, indiscriminate and amoral sexual experimentation.

Proponents of the program reject such concerns. Alex McKay, research coordinator for the Sex Informationand Education Council of Canada, claims that “[Y]oung people who are very well educated about sexuality and sexual health tend to delay having sex, because they fully understand everything that’s involved....”

That’s not true, according to a recent study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine of the American Medical Association. The study found that abstinence programs that teach human sexuality as predominantly psychological, emotional and moral rather than physical dropped sexual-activity rates among teens by a third in contrast with data-heavy “safe sex” programs.

If there were longitudinal, peer-reviewed studies attesting to the benefits of exposing children in the latency period to sexuality-charged curricula, we might be open to more experimentation along the lines proposed by Ontario’s Ministry of Education.

There being none, we see the program as a political vehicle for special interest groups obsessed with “social justice,” who perceive entrenchment of their libertine agenda in public school curricula as the quickest and most efficient route to detaching children from morality-based sexual values.

In the end, we are on the side of the children, and feel that prudence and parental privilege should be the watchword. Today’s world is so highly sexualized and the gateways to inappropriate images and message so ubiquitous, parents have their work cut out for them keeping their children in a state of innocence (a word one can scarcely say anymore without ironic airquotes). To everything there is a season. Ontario should back away from this ideologically-driven program, acknowledging the right of children to be children as nature made them.

National Post