Barbara Kay, The National Post
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Galit Rodan
In Ecclesiastes it is written, “There is a time for everything, and a season for everything under the sun … a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. …”
One does not have to be Christian or even religious to appreciate the anger that fuelled objections in the first go-around of the Ontario sex ed debate in 2009, enough to block its launch. It is bubbling up anew as the province’s Ministry of Education finally launches the program, virtually unchanged from its first incarnation. I am neither Christian nor religious, and I don’t like it at all.
I have three objections to the curriculum. The first is that it introduces advanced material too early, before children are psychologically ready to absorb it; the second is that it teaches details of intimate behaviour to children in a group that is best conveyed one-on-one or through texts a child can read alone; and the third is that the course teaches sex as behaviour that is detached from any moral component (apart from the responsibility not to spread disease or get pregnant).
Normally in children, between the ages of six to 12, known as the “latency period,” sexual energies fall dormant. It is because they are undistracted by sexuality in these years that children are optimally educable in the areas crucial to cultural growth: literacy, maths, history and science.
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