Chai Brady
The Government’s SPHE (Social, Personal and Health Education) curriculum has been criticised for its extreme ideological stances and ignoring traditional values such as love, marriage and commitment and the understanding of male and female.
Carol Nolan TD of Laois-Offaly, and a former school teacher, told The Irish Catholic that issues with the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) curriculum go deeper than the cartoon which negatively caricatured a ‘traditional Irish family’.
The senior cycle SPHE curriculum states that gender identity “refers to a person’s felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex registered at birth”.
Ms Nolan told The Irish Catholic that teachings around gender and sex are part of a “deliberate pattern that attempts to radically undermine basic sexual and biological realities”.
“This in turn cannot but have disorientating and indeed distressing outcomes for many young children who are being presented with what are essentially extreme ideological representations of human sex and gender expression.”
She continued: “Of course we must deal with gender confusion or gender dysphoria with compassion but we should avoid presentations of these conditions as the norm for childhood or adolescent sexual expression. The sense now is that children are not just being asked to explore these issues with respect but to support the underlying ideology as a given.”
Writing in this paper, CEO of the Iona Institute David Quinn said the NCCA “has been steadily revising the SPHE curricula for primary and secondary schools and for the most part the specifications are getting steadily worse”.
“The world view underlying the new specifications is hyper-individualistic. Relationships are treated as come and go. Sex is viewed in the same way. You can be in a relationship or not before sex, but it doesn’t really matter so long as you both consent to the act,” he said.
“Gender is presented as fluid. Boys are to be taught they might not really be boys, and girls that they might not really be girls. Everything is up in the air. Diversity is emphasised because then all choices will be equally respected.
“The specifications treat us as mainly solitary, unencumbered, individuals who float freely from one relationship to another and from one gender to another if we wish.”
Mr Quinn added: “There is nothing about the sacrifices needed to make real, loving relationships work, nothing about what might really make us happy long-term, and whether something like marriage could play an important part in that.
“Probably unknown to itself, the NCCA is actually presenting a rather bleak view of life to young people. Our children deserve something much better than that.”