There are some things that make me feel sick and one of these is disrespect for the innocence of children. It is something I never want to think about and if I had my way I would never choose to write about it. But the indignation that has been expressed by parents about the sex education being dished out to their kids leaves me no option.
On one hand I am disgusted; on the other I am not surprised. When I applied for training as a school teacher the moral qualifications required were of the highest standard. But even then those values were being eroded. The conversation between two senior lecturers, nearly 60 years ago, still rings in my ears. They were discussing the conduct, on a training-college study trip, of a boy I went to Sunday school with. I now see that their cavalier attitude towards casual sexual relationships was being allowed, even encouraged, as part of teacher training, something that teachers now with seeming impunity are dishing out to innocent children. How sick can our society get, when our educators teach this stuff and our Government funds it.
Jim Hopkins in his column in The New Zealand Herald describes as “well-intentioned wickedness” what is being taught as sex education to 12-year-olds and worse still, six-year-olds being told about sexual touch.
In his column this week Garth George says, “This so called sex education is in fact child abuse and is tantamount to paedophilia. It is not just misguided, not just ill-thought-out, not just dangerous, it is utterly evil”.
How hypocritical we are, when on one hand churchmen, youth workers, sports coaches, callous parents and paedophiles are rightly castigated for taking advantage of children under their care, or spell, and yet we employ people in our schools and reward them for destroying a child’s innocence and blighting their lives.
Bob McCroskie, National Director of Family First, and a father himself says, “After the evidence presented this week in the media, my dread is now more my kids coming home to tell me about the sex talk they had at school”. But alongside that he quotes Auckland University’s most recent National Secondary School Youth Survey that shows that among senior students over half are not sexually active.
He goes on to ask the question, “Why don’t we support the majority of youth who are choosing to abstain and encourage the sexually active to abstain?”
With an election pending this is an ideal time to ask the Government to change their funding policies in respect to sex education. Fund programmes that encourage abstinence and point out the risks, dangers and damage of casual sex, as a fence at the top of that cliff.
