Who has the right to educate our children

Aldous Huxley’s dystopian epic Brave New World portrayed a world where child-rearing was relegated to the state. Children were sent to state-run hatcheries whilst the idea of the ‘family’ was considered a vile and obnoxious concept. Indeed, one of the more offensive terms of abuse was to label someone a ‘mother’.

Whilst we are, thankfully, still a long way from that, parental rights continue to be attacked by statists and those who believe that, contrary to thousands of years of human experience, governments are better suited and have more right to make decisions about how we raise our children.

There are few areas where the struggle between the state and the family is more aggressive than in questions of morality.

The Age reported this week that Islamic schools are, “overturning the influence of Western sexual values on their students.” Citing the policies adopted by the Australian Council for Islamic Education in Schools, the report mentions that, “non-Muslim teachers would be banned from teaching sexual health classes” and students would be taught, “that premarital sex and homosexuality were anti-Islamic and therefore prohibited.” Likewise, ’safe sex’ is off the agenda because implicit in teaching about safe sexual practices is a tacit endorsement of pre-marital relations.

Naturally, such news had to be juxtaposed against the “teen health expert” who dutifully warned that sexual disease would become “rampant” unless the state introduces a universal sex-education program across all public and private schools.

“For the past 30 years there’s been very little change in the amount of focus on sex education in our schools, but in those 30 years there’s been a dramatic increase in risks associated with sexual activity,” said Professor Sawyer, director of the Royal Children’s Hospital’s Centre for Adolescent Health.

One might think, reading Professor Sawyer’s mention of ‘risks’, that sexual disease and unwanted pregnancy was something like avian flu: an affliction that could affect anyone who naively and blindly found themselves exposed to the virus. This is, of course, nonesense: sexual disease and unwanted teenage pregnancy only occur when teenagers engage in sexual activity. If they refrain from having sex — and, contrary to what one might conclude from reading teenage literature and magazines, it is possible for teenagers to refrain from having sex — then it is very difficult indeed for them to contract any of these diseases and even harder for them to get pregnant.

Furthermore, sex education has been a feature of our public school system for several decades, as it has in most Western societies, and yet infection and pregnancy (and abortion) rates continue to rise. Unless one suggests that such increases are solely the result of Muslim, Jewish and Christian students who have not ‘benefited’ from a liberal sex education, then the argument for government to force compulsory and uniform sex education on the state’s children is a rather weak one. In fact, as some studies now suggest, there may be even be a correlation between the liberalisation and spread of sexual education in schools and the rising abortion rate.

This is, however, a distraction. The real issue behind this controversy is the old question of who has the right to educate our children? Or, more specifically, do parents have a right to make moral judgements as to what is taught to their children, how it is taught and when it is taught?

Traditionally, the view has been that parents have ultimate responsibility for the education of their children but some may choose to outsource that responsibility to the private or public school system. In the case of sex education, this seems even more true. If parents choose to send their children to a school where sex is never mentioned, then that is their choice and as much their right as it might be for parents to send their children to a school where the full gamut of seuxal instruction is offered.
Calls for a ‘unified’ code of sex education should be exposed for what they are: an attempt to remove from parents the right to decide what, when and how they teach their children about sex and to place that in the hands of ’sex educationists’ whose views on sex may be far removed from that of the parents. In the case of believing Muslims, Jews and Christians, there is likely to be a gaping moral chasm between the values-free offering of the state and what we might consider acceptable. As for atheists or those whose views on sexuality are more liberal, then they should be equally concerned about state interference because of the possibility than one day they figurative boot might be on the other foot: that it might be the religious people who control the levers of government.
Distilled to its essence, compulsory state-defined sex education is an attempt to nationalise morality and subvert the role of parents in raising children. And for this reason it must be opposed by all people who value a parent’s right to raise their children in the manner that they believe best.