At Wolcott School in Thornton, Ill. a health teacher made 8th graders read aloud explicit questions about oral sex and masturbation during a sex-education lesson at a suburban school this week, outraging parents who demanded the teacher be disciplined.
While I am all for sex education this is WAY over the top.
The teacher made the printout from the "general questions" link, which is explicit and covers "G-spots," orgasms, anal sex, sexual positions and a how-to guide on masturbation.
Is it too much to expect public school teachers to show a modicum of common sense and to thoroughly review material they bring into the classroom?
4 comments:
I agree, it is not too much to expect teachers to use their common sense. Fortunately, the vast majority of them do.
When a teacher falters in this way, it is generally noted and can be corrected. I would worry more about home schoolers, as there is no way to know what they are reading their kids!
And yes, I'm sure that the majority of home schoolers are brilliant and always do exactly the right thing. But since most/many are not trained educators, most likely more of them screw up than teachers, and since there is no oversight, when they screw up there is no way to protect the kids!
I would think parents would have the RIGHT to read whatever they liked to their OWN kids.
NO, Alasandra, you are wrong. There are things that should not be read to a nine year old, for instance.
I'm sure there is a huge grey area, but that grey area stands between pretty clear distinctions.
I find your position on this very disturbing.
Alot of discusion has been going around these hs boards, and here is my fifty two senses:
RE: sex education, public school educators who make mistakes:
I think anecdotes are really all we have when it comes to counting, or enumerating that and those who take pains to hide from or refuse enumeration, comment, criticism, or observation, don’t you think? It is impossible to look into, examine, add up or observe anything and any body that actively, whether subtly or overtly discourages that option.
So of course, anecdote is what we have left when objective observation is discouraged--as it is in the case of homeschooling parents.
In my anecdotal experience, I have known about ten+ ‘families’ that claimed to be homeschoolers–that is ten that I have actually known( about thirty or so kids total) and the plus is for when when I add up those that they were affiliated with as homeschoolers( another fifty or so people). They ran the range from atheist or moon goddess secular to religiously fanatical families–and they covered the fields from confused/hiding/dysfunctional to hippies/antisocials/drug addicts to religious fanatics/control freaks/recovering idiots,and then that special breed of fundie/anti-government/hippie/controlfreak/dysfunctionals that fills the back regions of our country etc…
In all of my anecdotal experience,gleaned from actually knowing these people as a friend, assosciate, or as ‘one of them’ by default,the one commonality they all shared to the letter, was the lengths they all seemed to go to hide their parenting style from the view, and the law, of the land outside their front door–for whatever real and imagined reasons, whether it was other people views of the God that does’nt exist or mothers who like to sleep ‘in the family bed’. It didn’t matter which group they were from, the Rainbow people or the fundies;
Whereas some of them were just plain down to earth and kind of normal folks, and most of them were welcoming to me, personally, they were all so caught up in their insulated worlds that those poor kids just looked like victims to me, victims of immature parental viewpoints–parental viewpoints that seemed hoplessly somehow scarred by the view of the world that was full of little imagined hurts they never got over stemming back to grade school–a sort of inferiority complex dating back to their first experience with a non parent or a bully, a nun or a priest, or a bad boyfriend/girlfriend world of youthful angst, etc.( all of which are legitimate causes of angst, but not part of the world of the children these people have created, until it is made so by their parents who often never matured into ’society’ as it exists, not as one would create it in the insulated, and tightly controlled confines of the domestic household).
Operative word here: “seemed” to me–my subjective opinion.
Follow ups and longitudinal studies are hard/IMPOSSIBLE to do with these homeschoolers, because most that I have known are somewhat transient, in that they have moved from my view and my life, or I from them and theirs–often with great relief;-)
If their is any singular and non failing anecdote that I can draw from all of them, whether they were hippies whose drug habits and weed worshipnecessitated they hide from scrutiny or moon goddess Gaians who sleep with their children, or other religious whackoes,fundies, reformed Catholics, etc, the second, and perhaps most significant thing I can definitely say that they share in common was the overt sexualization of their children, i.e.–the instilling in boys that they are boys and in girls that they are girls, etc, and all of the other ‘expected behaviors’ that these parents were focused on–commonality two, with a twist: in these households I have seen the ‘gender wars’ raging! From the midwifing/Gaian recovering catholic mother who nursed her’last and most precious’ son until he was five years old( five years old??!!)who raised two ‘empowered’ single mother daughters( one pregnant at sixteen, one at seventeen–both single mothers.) I have also seen the extremes on the other side of religious insanity with a household where all the children were boys, and the religious zealot their mother was kept them knowing it every chance she got–because she was a “recovering adultress from Babylon”…;-) Too, I have seen the household with the single mother/drug addict/child abuser who finally got tired of the state ‘in her business’ that she went on the lam and raised a daughter that began her flock of babies at the ripe ol’ age of fifteen, because her homeschooling dictated that ‘mom needs a check in the house’ never mind that the girl was totally on her own with educating herself( can I get an amen for public tv?) and is now getting her undergrads at a community college–and mom is nowhere to be found or prosecuted.
Sure, I saw good things–the most religiously whacko of them had kids who played instruments remarkably well, and the hippiest of them were informed about farming, sewing, and animal husbandry–but really, it always has looked to me, anecdotally, as a cultish thing focused on ‘child husbandry’.
Of course there are other types, and excellent parenting styles that lend themselves to excellent homeschooling, and it does not take a rocket scientist to understand the formula: 2 much propaganda= not enough focus on childrens education= detached teaching styles= bad public schools, and I can only speak for myself when I say that it all looked ( and felt) weird to me in the environments of these people.
Why was I there? I was related to some of them;-) Why do I have the opinions I do? Because they all stuck together with the unwritten rulle of ” what goes on in your (homeschooling)house, is your business”... no matter WHAT was going on in those houses–and that, more than anything, will continue to be the mantra, and the operative thing that keeps anecdote as the only barometer of the unseen.
Oh, yeah: children are NOT personal property--they are an endowment to a future society, whether you create that society, or not,and they have the right to good non-invasive education from the public schools, but not necessarily in the homeschools--parents do not have a right to read whatever they want to children;-)
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