Firstly, there's the opt-out clause, which allows parents to opt their children out of any sexual education that they so choose. If the teachings "conflict with the child's sexuality", then they are capable of being removed from the class. Now, I'm no demographer, but it seems to me that those states with less comprehensive sex education programs...have teen pregnancy rates much higher than those of the rest of the continent (being Canada & the US).
And what's the reason? Is it because of psychological trauma that could come about? Nope, it's because of religious beliefs. Once again, we see a government caving into zealotry simply because it's too weak-kneed to put its foot down and tell the most conservative province in the country that it has to progress beyond the 1980s.
That alone was not enough to get my blood boiling over Bill 44, but the next clause is. When questioned about the bill with regards to the teaching of evolution,
Did I read this right? Did we all move to Oklahoma? With the exception of the crazies to our south, every other developed country in the world has accepted evolution as a hard-and-solid fact...EVEN VATICAN CITY has dismissed the idea that evolution is incompatible with The Roman Catholic Church. We are about to join the United States as being one of the only governments to reject evolution in the western world; putting us in illustrious company alongside...Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Tennessee (yay?).
This isn't cause for cheering, despite the improvement in gay rights legislation that accompanied it. This is cause for disgust, for public outcry. If we are so inept that we can't even accept the basic scientific teachings of evolutionary biology, and are so paranoid and insecure that we can't take a moment away from brainwashing our kids with creationism to allow them to have some cold hard science, then what's next? What happens when scientific evidence is presented for other hard and solid facts, such as global warming? Oh...wait...that explains a lot. Maybe the government could learn a bit of math while it's at it:
Government + Religion = Disaster
To the Alberta government: Get your religion out of my classroom, and your brainwashing out of my head - and those of my colleagues.
2 comments:
I agree to a degree. From the position of a teacher, this sort of intrusion is to be expected, and I actually welcome dialogue with a parent who is questioning what's going on in the classroom. I can hardly ask students to acknowledge but question authority intelligently when I'm not ready to have mine questioned. I draw the line, however, at a parent who arbitrarily imposes a prescriptive limitation on what his kid can hear or, worse yet, complains vigorously about the content after the fact when it's clearly not a problem for the kid.
I've yakked a lot about it on my blog too, by the way.
And nice one in the Herald this morning. Asking for more questions is always a good way to go.
Cheers!
Mhm, I have no problem with questioning for legitimate purposes (such as the psycho who taught Holocaust denial in central Alberta, that needs to be questioned and called out as lunacy), and yet I don't agree with withdrawing someone from biology class simply because a special book (written by someone who thought the earth was flat and the stars were angels) says evolution is wrong.
And thanks, I didn't get a phone-call @ 06:30 this morning, so it took several people at church telling me they'd seen it to alert me to it. Asking questions is never a bad thing (unless they're asked by stupid people). As you once said: There are no stupid questions, just stupid people; but there are a lot of stupid people.
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