The Canadian row over sex ed – and how Catholic schools have avoided it

The Ontario Ministry of Education released its updated Health and Physical Education (HPE) Curriculum Guidelines in March, one for elementary schools and another for secondary schools, both replacing the curriculum that had last been updated in 1999. While the bulk of the material focuses on Physical Education, a portion deals with "Healthy Living", and includes topics such as healthy eating; personal safety and injury prevention; substance abuse, addictions, and related behaviours; and human development and sexual health.

There has been a public outcry about the last topic. Parents, mainly Muslims and Protestants but also some Catholics, have voiced concerns about the way it is going to be addressed. (Ontario has Catholic state schools but children of other faiths must attend a secular school or go private.) The outcry has focused not on the basic curriculum expectations as such, but on the “examples” “student responses” and “teacher prompts” that are in the curriculum. These are only suggestions and are not mandated. They include discussions with 12-year-olds in grade 6 about “gender choice” and “gender expression”; with nine-year-olds in grade 3 about same-sex relations and with 13-year-olds in grade 7 about anal sex.

Adding the teacher prompts and examples though, has changed the way the public is looking at the curriculum. In Grade 3, students are asked to describe visible differences and invisible differences. The invisible ones include “e.g., learning abilities, skills and talents, personal or cultural values and beliefs, gender identity, sexual orientation, family background, personal preferences, allergies and sensitivities”). Children are then asked to identify ways of showing respect for differences in others.

Student: “We all come from different families. Some students live with two parents. Some live with one parent. Some have two mothers or two fathers. Some live with grandparents or with caregivers. We may come from different cultures. We also have different talents and abilities and different things that we find difficult to do.”

There has been little backlash to this from the Catholic community. What the curriculum requires us to do is ask pupils to “describe how visible differences and invisible differences make each person unique” – the examples are not mandatory.

Catholic schools will have to implement the new curriculum and the Institute for Catholic Education is responsible for applying a “Catholic lens” to the material.

Catholic teachers only use the teacher prompts and examples provided in our own Fully Alive programme. In comparison to the government curriculum, Fully Alive asks the students to: identify some of their personal characteristics and those of their classmates; recognise that their talents and gifts are meant to be shared with others; identify some of the talents and gifts that God has given them.

The teacher prompts for Fully Alive include: What kind of personality do you have? What are some of your likes and dislikes?

By omitting the teacher prompts and examples in the Ministry of Education Health and Physical Education curriculum, Catholic teachers can be aligned to the Fully Alive programme.

Fully Alive is rooted in the Catholic faith and provides reassurance to the Catholic community that the material has ecclesiastic approval, as well as being based in sound pedagogy.

Shelagh Peterson is a Religious Education coordinator at a large Catholic school board in Ontario

Photo courtesy of Globe and Mail