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“Do as I say, not as I do”
By Karin Litzcke
It is about a year since Peter and Murray Corren became special advisors on sexual identity to the BC Ministry of Education in return for dropping a human rights complaint against the government. Some of their input becomes operational this month with the introduction of a new optional social justice course being offered in some BC high schools.
Many people have criticized the decision to assign the Correns as special advisors, and their contract with the government does produce some discomfort in the context of democratic legitimacy. Of course they are not the only ones in a privileged position to give input, and they can hardly do worse than many who have gotten there through more conventional means. Funnily enough though, hegemony (“preponderant influence or authority,” per Merriam-Webster) is one of the injustices that the new Social Justice 12 course seeks to teach students to understand and protest.
There are also some valid concerns being advanced about how and where it is appropriate to put homosexuality and gender identity issues into the spotlight for a general population of children. These are difficult and dangerous discussions, because the issue is so polarized over the question of homosexuality itself, and polarized conversations are never productive of anything except increased entrenchment of opinion.
Polarization of an issue is always a sure sign that the questions worth pursuing are actually elsewhere, and in this case, I think the key question is whether putting sexual orientation and gender identity issues in the curriculum will achieve the safer and more inclusive world that we all hope will ensue. I certainly wish it would, and hope it will, but the history of such initiatives says there is no hope of reaching any students other than those already predisposed to hear your message.
Initiatives like this one always fail to meet the needs of all learners, often fail to meet the needs of any learners, and quite often backfire and produce exactly the effect they are meant to avoid. The consistent failure of programs intended to reduce bullying, drunk driving, violence, racism, drug use, and sexism springs quite readily to mind. All of these have been the topics of earnest efforts to change society by changing the next generation, and all remain entrenched features of both youth and adult life.
I think the reason that initiatives like this one always fail is that children are programmed to internalize and express the society they have, not the society any of us wish they had.
Vying for the power to instruct them in values is not going to change the pointlessness of doing so. By their failure to absorb and reflect the sent messages rather than the current reality, the children seem to be sending us a consistent message that our job as adults is to manage the society we have, not to tell them how to manage the society that they are going to have. By teaching them values that we have not yet learned to integrate and realize into current life, we are basically trying to design their future society according to our present vision. It is a message that they reject, and quite rightly so. We can have no idea what constraints or conditions they will live under, and no idea what compromises and adaptations will be required of them. As such, we have no right to burden them with expectations at all, and certainly not with untested ones.
All of the many social agendas that find their way into schools are, for this reason, frankly abusive of children and prejudicial to their future. When we burden them with expectations of peace, for instance, we render them less able to cope effectively with a threat of war.
It is wrong for adults to dump their unrealized dreams onto the slender shoulders of the next generation, however well-intentioned we are in doing so. To pass our dreams on may also sabotage our chances of ever realizing them ourselves.
By focusing our change efforts on children, we not only evade our responsibilities to act on our dreams as adults, but also we waste valuable time haggling over what should be taught to children about an ideal world. We need our time and our resources to effectively resolve the issues at hand among ourselves, among competing interests.
Social change occurs at the rate at which we model it, not the rate at which we indoctrinate children. When we take responsibility for solving the issues ourselves, we pass the solutions, rather than the problems themselves and our probably imperfect dreams of solutions, into the next generation.
On the issue of sexuality, much has changed for the better thanks to many brave individuals with alternative sexual preferences and in the mainstream heterosexual community. The kinds of bravery and insight that are required for continued improvement will vary as the status quo evolves. However, it will never be brave to seek to realize change through children instead of working it out among adults.
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The Schools We Need
