In Ontario, fifty different groups have asked officials to implement its highly prudent new sexual health education curriculum, which has been ready to go for the last three years. Yet politician Dalton McGunity, 24th Premier of Ontario, Canada from 2003 to 2013, backed away after some hysterical fundamentalist protests. For Rick Salutin, Canadian novelist, playwright and critic, there’s more at work here than just political caution; ‘fear of a general panic among adults about what the hell is going on with kids and sex on the Internet.’
Salutin explains, ‘A sophisticated arts critic recently told me she was aghast at sexual imagery her nieces can now access. A battle-scarred senior journalist who’s fearlessly exposed major public horrors says the oral and anal sex that kids see online is “just wrong.”…I’d like to add a touch of historical perspective.’ According to Salutin, in the 1950s the FBI compiled a 119-page dossier in the 1950s on hidden sexual lyrics in “Louie Louie,” an early rock ‘n roll classic. ‘When there was no Internet there was terror of playing vinyl at different speeds,’ he says.
‘I’m not saying there are no new risks or challenges about sexuality for youth today,’ Salutin notes. ‘There are but there always were. Adults might want to provide models but they forget they received no usable models themselves. Parental models are always obsolete. Each generation is more or less on its own, though it would be nice to get a little help. That’s what the sex ed curriculum tries to do: some terms and facts but even more, through discussion with elders, a sense that others have handled comparable stuff with at least some success, thereby providing kids a sense that they, too, will be able to deal with this and – most important in my opinion – we have confidence in your ability to do so.’
Yet it’s not just the fears about student sexual wellness that Salutin has a problem with, but also how children’s wellbeing is being affected by bullying. ‘Literally no one, according to kids and teachers, considers themselves a bully,’ Salutin says, but rather there is the usual human range of conflict, aggression, and damage. He asks, ‘does categorizing it all with a simplistic, one-sided term, as if it’s the H1N1 virus, which you can then seek a cure for and pass laws against – help, or make things harder?’ Salutin adds, ‘Bullying (or what it ineptly refers to) and sexuality aren’t sidelines to juggle so that the real task of taking arid tests like this week’s EQAO exams can occur. They’re the essential concerns of education, as an ongoing intergenerational examination of life’s challenges. It’s why we have teachers, and schools.’