Ontario Sex Ed Curriculum Uproar

[MTL]

There has been a great deal of controversy for some time, now, in Ontario,
surrounding the new sex ed curriculum for public schools.

The curriculum was proposed by the previous Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty (Liberal)
but was shelved due to loud objection, mostly from Toronto,
mostly from Conservatives, from ethnic minorities, and from religiously devout demographics.

Interestingly, the Liberal provincial government still won the next election in a landslide,
but now with a new leader...Kathleen Wynne...the first openly gay Provincial Premier in Canada.

(That's right...our Provincial Leader in Ontario is gay.  You read that correctly.)

Kathleen Wynne immediately promised to advance the new public school sex ed curriculum, again,
and succeeded in getting it passed...amidst outrage from her opponents,
which has been positively rabid.

The opponents to the new curriculum are mostly Conservatives,
many if not most of whom are also vocally opposed to LGBT rights.

They SAY they are upset because they opine that sex ed should be done at home,
by parents, and that the new curriculum:

A.  Teaches far too much, too graphically, at too early an age

B.  Teaches that "everyone is unique" and teaches tolerance of LGBT, including Gender Identity and Orientation

C.  Educates on issues such as sexting, social media

But the main source of outrage is obviously that this curriculum has been advanced
by an openly-gay Liberal Premier
with issues addressed such as homophobia.

Basically, they don't want their kids being taught that it's okay to be gay or transgender.

The new curriculum took effect this week, after a very long wait.

One school in Toronto saw HALF its students kept home by parents

and the schools have also seen vandalism in protest of the curriculum.

Note:

they still don't educate children on Puberty until Grade 4,
.....which is the same time I had that education, back in the 1980s.

What is new, is this sort of stuff:

- more thoroughly acknowledging the emotional side of sexual development
- that "no means no", and how to discern healthy relationships from unhealthy ones,
- how to guard against online and real life predators,
- respecting differences in people
- responsible use of electronic devices and social media
- education, all the way into Grade 12, about mental health issues and stigmas

This new curriculum even specifically addresses
"delaying sexual activity until older" content in Grade 7,

BEFORE the Grade 8 content, "making safe decisions about sexual activity"

Here is the new curriculum, on the Ontario Government website:

https://www.ontario.ca/page/sex-education-ontario

[brewer]

Please keep us up to date on this. Should be very interesting to see how this plays out. Especially the continued attendance or lack there of.

My feeling is knee jerk reaction, but I could be wrong.

[MTL]

Oh, I hope so. But this has been rankling for a long time.

[SteelCurtain]

Sex positivity is such a fucking marvelous thing.

Not a single one of those issues even raises an eyebrow for me.

[Pyrrho]

I always find resistance to sex education puzzling.  My Southern Baptist mother did not object to me specifically taking an optional sex ed class when I was young, nor did she object to the school-wide programs in sex education.

Teaching people about birth control and so forth is not the same as telling them to go have sex.  It seems, though, that morons do not understand that.

It is amazing that people seem to have the idea that keeping people ignorant about sex will keep them from having sex.  As if your dog needs a class in sex education in order to figure out how to have sex!

Honestly, it seems that one must be a total moron to be opposed to sex education.  There really seems to be no other explanation.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I always find resistance to sex education puzzling.  My Southern Baptist mother did not object to me specifically taking an optional sex ed class when I was young, nor did she object to the school-wide programs in sex education.

Teaching people about birth control and so forth is not the same as telling them to go have sex.  It seems, though, that morons do not understand that.

It is amazing that people seem to have the idea that keeping people ignorant about sex will keep them from having sex.  As if your dog needs a class in sex education in order to figure out how to have sex!

Honestly, it seems that one must be a total moron to be opposed to sex education.  There really seems to be no other explanation.

My mother, a devout Southern Baptist fundamentalist, not only refused to sign my permission form in the 6th grade (I was eleven) for me to attend the SexEd class with the rest of my grade, she personally took the form in to the Principle of the school to ensure that I would be given other duties during the time (two hours every Wednesday) the rest of the kids were in the auditorium learning about SexEd.

Unfortunately for my mother, this backfired, as I was immediately teased for what I did not know by the other children, and thus requested (and got) permission to go next door to the Public Library during my two-hour session for a "study hall" time, during which I would look up books on human sexuality. While the other kids were watching "Fuzzy Bunny Gets Hair in New Places" videos (Simpsons joke), I was reading Dr.Ruth, books about Kinsey and Masters & Johnson, etc.

[Pyrrho]

I always find resistance to sex education puzzling.  My Southern Baptist mother did not object to me specifically taking an optional sex ed class when I was young, nor did she object to the school-wide programs in sex education.

Teaching people about birth control and so forth is not the same as telling them to go have sex.  It seems, though, that morons do not understand that.

It is amazing that people seem to have the idea that keeping people ignorant about sex will keep them from having sex.  As if your dog needs a class in sex education in order to figure out how to have sex!

Honestly, it seems that one must be a total moron to be opposed to sex education.  There really seems to be no other explanation.

My mother, a devout Southern Baptist fundamentalist, not only refused to sign my permission form in the 6th grade (I was eleven) for me to attend the SexEd class with the rest of my grade, she personally took the form in to the Principle of the school to ensure that I would be given other duties during the time (two hours every Wednesday) the rest of the kids were in the auditorium learning about SexEd.

Unfortunately for my mother, this backfired, as I was immediately teased for what I did not know by the other children, and thus requested (and got) permission to go next door to the Public Library during my two-hour session for a "study hall" time, during which I would look up books on human sexuality. While the other kids were watching "Fuzzy Bunny Gets Hair in New Places" videos (Simpsons joke), I was reading Dr.Ruth, books about Kinsey and Masters & Johnson, etc.

Do you have any idea what your mother's reasoning was?  

My mother was a devout Southern Baptist fundamentalist, and she did not want me having sex before marriage, which she regarded as sinful (since your mother was a devout Southern Baptist fundamentalist, I will assume that you are aware of the existence of relevant passages in the Bible and not bother with any of that presently).  But she did not want me to be an ignorant fool and know nothing about sex.  And she understood that knowledge about something is not the same as doing that something.  So she had absolutely no problems with me having sex education in school.

Why did your mother object to you having sex education?

[Faith No More]

The one thing I really remember from my sex education was the day they tried to shock us with graphic pictures of genitals ravished by sexually transmitted diseases. I was ready to cut my dick off by the end of it, and I couldn't eat lunch that day.

[vorlon13]

Imagine me in charge of coming up with an instructional class for young people.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Do you have any idea what your mother's reasoning was?  

Why did your mother object to you having sex education?

Our church heavily emphasized the concept of "the World versus Christians", and she felt that it wasn't the place of the school (secular government) to teach me about sex, but that it was something I needed to learn via the Church's teachings only.

Similarly, I grew up without any form of TV broadcast/cable, even though we had a television set and VCR, because an evangelist had told them, quote, "Television is Satan's way of sneaking into your home". The VCR setup let them control 100% of what we watched, usually via tapes checked out from our public library (she's a theatre professor, so lots of Broadway and classic movies) and from our church library (Christian videos). Today, I often joke that it's kind of amazing I turned out straight, given the sheer volume of Broadway musicals to which I was subjected as a child.