While chewing my porridge this morning and flicking through BBCi, I came across news that the House of Commons has passed a reform to the Children, Schools and Families Bill. This amendment would allow faith-based schools to teach sex education in a manner that reflected the underlying dogma of said faith.
The last thing we need is more religion in schools, especially in an area as volatile as sex. I like how Ed Balls (the Schools Secretary) had the nerve to say:
“There is no opt-out for any faith school from teaching the full, broad, balanced curriculum on sex and relationship education and that is a huge step forward.”
The problem is that the so-called “full [...] curriculum” is awful. All that is required to be taught is basic sexual biology, and nothing about the other factors of sex, such as sexuality, contraception, STIs; important areas that will be skewed and distorted by religion. The only thing this is going to lead to is further lack of information for teenagers about sex, more young minds poisoned and misinformed. Another thing that I found very aggravating was the following line of the article on the BBC News website (link below):
The “religious character” amendment to the bill was passed without debate due to a lack of parliamentary time.
Seriously? “lack of [...] time”? If our ‘leaders’ can’t even make the time to discuss something relating to the education of the future minds of our world, then something is seriously wrong. It further angers me how the public had no say in this whatsoever, how the people that the decision affects have no word (as usual =P ).
In conclusion, I think Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, hit the nail on the head when he said:
“[the government has] once more bowed to pressure from the Catholic Church, betraying the children in faith schools who have a right to objective and balanced sex education”.
