In 1998, cellphones were not ubiquitous. There was no Facebook or Instagram, and sexting was an activity that would have been impossible to understand.

I was 14 and starting high school. I remember learning rudimentary things about sexual health at school, many of which were less useful than the lesson my mother had delivered to me years earlier with a wooden spoon and a Ziploc bag when I asked a precocious question about AIDS and condoms.

Ontario's previous sexual-education curriculum was developed in 1998 and didn't acknowledge same-sex relationships, which I'm sure made some of my classmates feel isolated and even more confused.

We are in the year 2018: 1998 is 20 years ago. In the last 20 years, so much has changed about how we understand the world around us. Our previous provincial government, regardless of what you may think of it or how you may have voted at the polls, acknowledged this fact and pushed through a comprehensive and thorough sexual-education curriculum for students that reflected the current world.

But because a vocal minority that happens to vote Conservative was outraged by this curriculum — which was developed by educators in consultation with parents — our new government campaigned on a cheap political promise to do away with it.

On Wednesday, Ontario’s Education Minister Lisa Thompson announced that the revised curriculum is gone and will be replaced with the 1998 version. This government is keen to demonstrate its so-called respect for parents.

But as a parent, I am feeling the opposite of respected right now. This is political opportunism disguised in “respect for parents.”

The revised sex-ed curriculum put students first, ahead of their parents’ partisan, cultural or religious views, and taught them how to keep themselves safe and avoid developing bigotry against those who are different from them. How are such lessons objectionable?

I was delighted when my eldest son came home from kindergarten last fall and shared something he had learned about personal space.

“Mama, you have to ask before you go in my bubble,” he said. It was annoying when I was prevented from cuddling him, but it wasn’t annoying when I realized it mirrored the lessons of consent my husband and I strive to impart to him and his brother.

The age-appropriate lessons from the revised sex-ed curriculum will still be taught in my house. I will teach my sons the proper names for genitalia, the risks of sexting, the concept of consent, and how to avoid sexually transmitted infections.

I worry about the children who would only have been exposed to these ideas in school, where the standardized curriculum teaches the same important lessons to everyone, no matter what their parents believe is appropriate.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

In bowing to the squeaky-wheel minority, our new provincial government has disrespected parents in the silent majority and, much worse, done a great disservice to the students of this province.

It’s 2018, not 1998. Why would we revert to a sex-ed curriculum that thinks otherwise?

Cassandra Drudi is a Toronto writer.

Read more about: