By: Simon Jenkins.
Who should teach children about sex? The education secretary, Damian Hinds, must be desperate for attention. This week of all weeks, he has taken the government into battle with Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups, probably half the Conservative party and 100,000 petitioners to parliament. Hinds wants instruction in LGBT “sensitivity and inclusiveness” to be “integral throughout the programme of study”. He wants to reform and expand “relationships education” through all schools, and to end a parent’s right to withdraw a child from sex education once he or she reaches 15.
These changes gave rise to a Commons debate on Monday, stimulated in part by a coalition of parents, churches and minority groups, almost all declaring a “fundamental right to decide what their children learn” about sex and relationships. Many were deeply offended at this right now being denied. It was, said a Tory MP, a “shift of power from the individual to the state”. It was not government’s job to dictate parental, communal and religious mores.
In principle I am with Hinds. What are now called life skills should lie at the core of a liberal education. Even if controversial, they should be tackled. Knowing how to handle the real world of work and play, money and credit, the law, mental and physical health, self-presentation, online security and human relationships should be “the curriculum”. This must embrace getting on with other people of all sorts, learning how to disagree without anger, text without cruelty, and love without harm. Children are bombarded with pressures against which they need help.
I have been a governor in various schools, none of which taught these skills. Once a child has learned to read and write, the curricular dinosaurs still lumbering around Britain’s classrooms – maths, science, modern languages – should be classed as “optional extras”. They are subjects learned and forgotten, drilled into children only to be measured by the state and then discarded. They are not essential to anyone’s start in life.
But where I am not with Hinds is that this is none of his business. His job is to administer and resource a public service, not to dictate how its staff do their work. I wonder what doctors would say if a health minister told them how to cure lung cancer, or a transport minister told pilots how to fly.
Everyone thinks they know how to teach. They don’t. It is very hard. A teacher friend tells me he never taught his pupils anything as tough or embarrassing as sex. The worst part was having to show a dire BBC video. Children learn the facts of life either from other children or from a responsible adult. I would prefer an adult. But in the race between the classroom and the playground, the playground usually wins. Sex educationis for trained counsellors in small groups.
Either way, this is for schools to decide. They have suffered the worst from government over-centralism since Thatcher’s assault on local democracy in the 1980s. From Kenneth Baker’s reactionary “national curriculum” of 1988, through Ed Balls’ wheelbarrow of directives to Hinds’ sex manuals, the trend has been the same: centralise and standardise. Whitehall even issues guidance on punctuation marks. Hinds complained last month that central testing was so ubiquitous that children were doing homework for Sats. But they are his tests. Why order them and then stop schools fighting to win?
To hark back to days when education was a local service is hardly archaic. It is in most liberal-minded countries. Helping children get on with others in their community, including those from different backgrounds, should be a communal function specifically because it is delicate. With the decline of churches, schools are the only places to perform this task. They either show themselves sensitive to local characteristics, traditions and even prejudices, or communities fragment and collapse. A school should never be an obedient cog in a nationalised machine, an NHS of the blackboard jungle.
On Monday, petitioners against these reforms claimed that sexuality and the “physical, psychological and spiritual implications” of LGBT should not be part of a mandatory curriculum. They are right only on the word mandatory, but there they are spot on. If ever there was a topic for ministers to leave to professionals, it is this. Leave a difficult job to those for whom it is a vocation, not a headline opportunity.
Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/01/ministers-sex-education-schools
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