The strange and disturbing content of the new SPHE programme

There has been something of a hue and cry about a textbook for use in Social Personal and Health Education (SPHE) class in secondary schools. The textbook in question shows an extremely unflattering caricature of an Irish family and then compares it with a much nicer, more diverse and open-minded family and it is no mystery which one pupils are meant to prefer, and it’s not the Irish family.

The caricature was so crude that it created a backlash and EdCo, the company behind the schoolbook, has now withdrawn the offending section from use. But this doesn’t go anywhere like far enough because the book as a whole is a disaster and so are many other of the books used in SPHE class, which incorporates Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE).

As Eoin O’Malley, a lecturer in politics at Dublin City University put it: “Removing that page from the book won’t fix it. The whole curriculum is ideologically-driven drivel”.

Your average parent will be totally unaware of this as generally speaking they are kept in school and never brought home. In other words, parents don’t know what their children are being taught in these classes and how extreme or unexpected it can sometimes be.

Teachings

For example, one book called My Wellbeing Journey 2 has five pages on masturbation. The textbook is aimed at pupils studying for the Junior Certificate. At one point in this section, pupils learn “Even babies and young children know it feels good to touch their own genitals”. What an extraordinary thing to be teaching schoolchildren.

Look up the book in question online and you will find it. I am not making this up. It is produced by Gill Education. Parents of a more ‘liberated’ kind might think teaching their children about masturbation in a school setting is the healthiest and most natural thing in the world, another sign that we have rejected our repressive past.

Lots of other parents might have a different point of view and might think their children would be better off doing a bit more maths or English or PE than hearing all about masturbation. But one way or the other, how about consulting them to find out what they do think?

The schools are allowed to adapt these to their own ethos. The Catholic Church has been producing some of its own material for use in Catholic schools”

SPHE class in general pushes gender ideology on pupils extremely strongly. Gender ideology teaches that your biological sex and your ‘gender’ can be totally unrelated. Therefore, someone born male can later identify as ‘female’ or vice versa. They might also say there are ‘gender non-binary’.

This is an extremely controversial and contentious point of view and yet pupils are taught it as though it as self-evident a truth as 2 and 2 equals 4.

Who decided that all secondary school children should be taught gender ideology without teaching them any of the problems with this theory?

One big source of it is the National Council of Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA), which is a very powerful body that sets out in broad terms the specifications for each subject in school. The schools are allowed to adapt these to their own ethos. The Catholic Church has been producing some of its own material for use in Catholic schools. SPHE material has been developed, for example, and some of it is excellent.

Content

It is hard to say how widely Catholic schools actually use them, however. What we do know is that the SPHE books produced by the big education publishers are mainly terrible, as we see from some of what I’ve outlined about, and all these publishers can truthfully say that they are adapting the NCCA specifications in their own way. Are the schools then having a proper look at what is actually in these books?

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.

But apart from what is in the SPHE specifications, what is left out is also a big problem.

The SPHE specifications from 2011 that have just been replaced have a different take”

For example, the new SPHE specification for Senior Cycle pupils (basically Leaving Cert students) has just been published by the NCCA. You must consider that the course incorporates relationships so it would seem reasonable to expect quite a bit about relationships within the family, or about long-term committed relationships with your peers and boyfriends/girlfriends. You might even expect a few mentions of love and marriage and the prospect of eventually having children.

But in the new specification there is either no mention of the above or very little. Marriage isn’t mentioned at all. Love gets two mentions, and one of them is a reference to ‘love of learning’.

One of the five references to family in the 24-page specification is in the context of domestic violence.

‘Commitment’ and ‘committed’ get no mention.  ‘Brothers’, ‘sisters’ and ‘siblings’ get no mention. ‘Parents’ get one neutral mention. ‘Friends’ and ‘friendship’ get one mention.

But ‘choice’ gets nine mentions. ‘Diversity’ gets 11. ‘Gender’ receives 26, ‘sex’ 56. We have 11 mentions of ‘inclusive.’

Relationships

One aim of the new specification is to help students develop “healthy relationships” as they go through life and learn how to “demonstrate the awareness and skills needed for nurturing healthy in-person and online relationships, including respecting boundaries, communicating effectively, navigating difficult conversations, preventing and managing conflict and dealing with break-ups”.

That’s a mouthful, but the passage mainly treats relationships as potentially threatening, which they can be, but it is not very positive and hopeful, is it? The word ‘healthy’ is preferred to ‘loving’.

The SPHE specifications from 2011 that have just been replaced have a different take. One of its aims was to “discuss the role of commitment and relationship skills in marriage and other committed relationships, that help to support lasting relationships and family life”.

That is all gone. Why is that? Are students no longer to aspire to marrying one day?

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.

The specifications treat us as mainly solitary, unencumbered, individuals who floats freely from one relationship to another”

Sex is presented as being mainly about pleasure and people can treat one another as means to that end, again so long as there is consent. Love isn’t even regarded as an afterthought in this context in the NCCA specifications.

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.

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.