(CNS photo/Tony Gentile, Reuters) Our readers are likely, by now, to be familiar with the offensive, and some may say, racist, section in a Junior Certificate textbook that depicted a ‘traditional’ Irish family as a plastic Paddy-type trope in contrast to a multi-cultural uber-progressive family.
The publishers, EdCo – the Educational Company of Ireland – has apologised for this insulting caricature and committed to removing the section from its Junior Cycle Health and Wellbeing SPHE 1 textbook.
In a section entitled ‘All Different, All Equal’, an Aran-jumper wearing Irish family is described as eating bacon, cabbage and potatoes every day and not liking change or difference, while a mixed-race family is depicted as eating more varied foods and travelling internationally. The contrast can only be taken as portraying the ‘traditional’ family in a negative light, ironically, informing the student that all families are not equal. The traditional Irish family is something to be laughed at and avoided.
While the apology and removal of the offensive section is welcome, it does not resolve the underlying problems. Firstly, how was such offensive stereotyping allowed into a textbook in the first place given that stereotyping of any race or culture is supposedly off the agenda? Clearly, the publishers and the authors, were not able to recognise the prejudice and unconscious bias that they hold for anything ‘traditionally’ Irish. Yet, there were no gatekeepers at the publishers or the Department of Education that felt it necessary to say no.
Anyone that had the opportunity to read the draft Senior Cycle curriculum would be forgiven for not understanding exactly what was being proposed to be taught to students. The documentation is filled with vague language that gives parents little idea as to what their children will actually learn, and what exactly will be taught in schools. The focus on literacy and numeracy is minimal, while the focus is on (mal)forming the students’ outlook on life. Specific subjects are instrumentalised for a greater ‘good’.
The SPHE Health and Wellbeing 1 publication by EdCo is a product of a similar process of curriculum development for the Junior Certificate. Under the guise of seemingly benign language, an ideology is being imposed on children and young people, unbeknownst to their parents. What is this ideology? One only needs to turn a few pages past the offending section of the textbook to encounter discussions about gender identity, and the adoption of language that is at odds with Catholic teaching as objective fact.
Children learn that recently created words such as ‘cisgender’, ‘non-binary’ are an accepted part of the English language, that sex ‘is assigned at birth’, and that everyone has a ‘gender identity’ that can be at odds with the sex one was ‘assigned’. All this is treated as fact. This is being taught in schools. In Catholic schools. David Quinn, in his column this week highlights a textbook that dedicates five pages to discussing masturbation in a junior cycle textbook. Pupils learn “Even babies and young children know it feels good to touch their own genitals”.
All this has been highlighted before. The WHO has previously issued guidance on comprehensive sexuality education that says the exact same thing but those that tried to highlight this were dismissed repeatedly for scaremongering. And now it is in our schools.
At the same time, the freedom of Catholic schools to teach through a Catholic lens is being reduced. The time allowed for religious education is reduced while ‘SPHE’ and ‘Relationship & Sexuality Education’ is now a requirement. The reshaping of the curriculum to ‘integrate’ an undefined ‘ethic’ across all subjects means that it is increasingly impossible for a parent to know with a reasonable degree of certainty what their child will be learning by way of morals, and even more difficult to ‘opt out’ when English or Maths is infused with subtle and not-so-subtle messaging.