CAN anyone reading this remember the teacher who was key to their understanding of sex and relationships? No. Me neither. In fact, the idea that I would gain this “knowledge” from teachers, for me at least, seems a bit bizarre and weird.

Increasingly, however, it would appear that, for the Scottish Government at least, this is to be the way of things, and their focus on teaching children about sex is growing.

One of the reasons you can tell that it is growing is because there is also an increasing number of parents who are protesting about this development and there are regular protests in Glasgow about what is happening.

Concerns, for example, are raised about the sex surveys in schools that ask 14-year-olds about intimate details of their sex lives, something that even the Children’s Commissioner has raised concerns about.

There are also concerns about primary aged children being taught, with the help of graphic images, how to have sex.

Some are worried about the promotion of pornography in secondary schools. Others have raised concerns about the appointment of key individuals who are promoting the advancement of sex and relationship education in schools, some of whom appear to want to break down the barriers between sexuality and childhood.

I’ve spent some time discussing these issues with concerned parents and grandparents. Some of the arguments that what is happening in schools is a form of paedophilia are not helpful. But, as one parent argued, if the material shown to young children was shown to them by anyone outside a school setting, they would quite possibly be arrested.

However, teachers are not just any adult, they are there to educate children. But should they be breaking down the barrier between childhood and sexuality, and is it the place of teachers to be so involved in the emerging sexuality and sex lives of children?

Part of the problem with the promotion of sex talk in school is that it is done through the grandiose talk of children’s sexual rights and human rights. Considering that having sex under the age of 16 is, at least formally, a crime, it is difficult to know what sexual rights actually are in this context.

Looking at the concerns of people who could be called traditional, I often find myself in disagreement with them. I have no concerns about homosexuality for example. I also think that underage sex between teenagers is something that would often best be dealt with without any need of the law. In general, I would say I’m pretty liberal when it comes to matters of sex and sexuality.

However, I also think that there is something quite wrong in the way that parents' values are demeaned and dismissed in this discussion.

I also believe that there is something deeply worrying about a state education system that appears to be unable to recognise the distinction between the public and the private and their apparent inability to recognise what is and is not age appropriate.

The loss of this sense of the importance of privacy and a private life for families and children, and also the loss of distinction between childhood and adulthood, in part at least, stems from “experts” who feel that they and their enlightened views must be instilled in children. This is partly generated by the idea that the “personal is political”, and in many respects, we need to understand that what many of our postmodern sex educators are doing, is bringing their politics, their ideology of “openness”, into the classroom.

It is because it is an ideology, and one that often sets parents against children, and believes that children need to be liberated from their “traditional” parents that sex education in Scotland is becoming unhinged. Indeed, you don’t have to be conservative or a Christian to look at some of the material being taught to children and to think that the education authorities have lost the plot and that they need to be told that in many respects, this is not their business.

Some parents may well think that graphic sexual images are fine for young children or think that discussing the use of pornography in secondary school is necessary. Many others, and I suspect the majority, think that certain aspects of a person’s private and sexual life are not the business of schools and believe that promoting sexual “values” is not something they would expect from an educational institution.

The reality is that that there is now a sexual values dogma being pushed on to schools and children and, I suspect, the protests are going to grow.

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