The Slight To Teachers A Real Mark Against Alberta's Bill 44

As the debate over Bill 44 rages in Alberta, a wide range of issues have been aired. It seems fairly clear that social conservatives, faced with the inevitability of protecting gay rights in provincial legislation, sought an opportunity to establish for parents the prerogative to pull their children from classes in which a "homosexual agenda" might be pushed. While the existence of a "homosexual agenda" in schools is absurd, it appears that no one can do a better job in describing an approach formed by progressive thinking on sexual orientation. That parents would be permitted to exclude their children from discussions of sex, religion, and sexual orientation underlines only how difficult it is to parse intertwined cultural issues. In Newfoundland in the 1980s, we had a high school class called "Family Living." God knows what we learned: I do not remember a specific topic covered, even though my transcript tells me that I received 98 per cent. (Sorry, Mrs. Pope.) Now because someone thinks that it would be wrong to have a unit in such a course acknowledge that gay couples raise children together, we intend to arm parents with a tool that could, potentially, allow them also to keep their children home from a religion class that discusses Christian denominations that happen to sanction gay marriage?

Obviously, I do not teach high school, but my own lesson plans underline how difficult it is to differentiate classes that discuss sexual orientation in passing from classes that are organized around the topic. In the wake of the popularity of Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994), I used to teach W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues," the poem read by Matthew at Gareth's funeral. That Auden, a gay man, was drawing on his own experience in mourning was relevant only when students, responding to all the masculine pronouns, assumed Auden was Wendy or Whitney or Winnifred. On the other hand, the author's willful manipulation of readers' expectations about gender has always been more central to my teaching of Jeanette Winterson's masterfully clever Written on the Body (1992). If I was teaching this material to fifteen year-olds, could I expect everyone aboard for Auden and absenteeism for Winterson?

It is ridiculous, of course. I do not think that it takes a village to raise a child, and parents have a responsibility to see their children educated. But in spite of what the "home schoolers" say, almost all parents lack the capacity and the time to provide children classroom instruction. There is more to education than what is given in schools, and parents should embrace that role enthusiastically. For the other, they rely on professionals, the teachers. This is where my conservatism comes in: teaching your children is why, for some time, we have trained and hired teachers. And while I know that some do, I do not think that parents should meddle in the work that professional doctors and lawyers and mechanics are called upon, sometimes, to undertake for children of high school age. Similarly, they should not meddle with the work of trained, qualified, vetted teachers who are subject to supervision, scrutiny, and evaluation.

To suggest otherwise is the height (or is it depth?) of disrespect.

Comments

[Craig Monk]

I think it is noteworthy that we moved so quickly from "I object to the manner in which you teach this" to "I object to your teaching this, altogether"!

[Rohan Maitzen]

There are so many things wrong with this opt-out clause it's hard to know where to start, but I like where you started. I'd also add that there is a real confusion suggested over teaching and endorsing or advocating: the apparent conviction that teachers are not professional enough to provide information about a range of topics without trespassing on parents' rights to define their own "family values" is also insulting to teachers. When I choose to teach Hard Times, I'm not thereby telling my students to oppose unions and be paternalistic to their employees...