Welcome to TMI Elementary

A few years ago, a controversy erupted in the Diocese of Nashville, at Father Ryan High School, particularly, about a sexuality education program.

It was the usual dynamic: Someone decided that it would be a good thing to incorporate explicit lessons on sex in the curriculum, and then someone made the equally stupid decision that it would be a good thing to belittle and threaten parents who…had questions.

I wrote about it here.

I had a few points to make. First was that the curriculum was, really, way too much. It was weirdly too much. As in – you wondered about the person who dreamed this up.

The second point was related, and it was rooted in my own experiences teaching high school and, of course, my experience as a mother of five kids, and then ultimately, my experience as a human being.

It was this:

This is about more than this particular situation. It gives anyone working on these issues in parish or school settings something to think about.

So if you’re in charge of things like this in your school or parish, you might want to consider the weird factor. You might want to consider that the parents who are not down with your plans don’t hate sex, don’t want their kids to be ignorant about sex and don’t want them to be ignorant of the Church’s teaching. The parents of kids in your school might even have had some sexy time themselves recently.

Maybe, just maybe…they think it’s…. odd …for random adults to be bound and determined to talk to young teens – who are required to be in this setting, without parents present and are graded on their responses- about the mechanics of sexual activity, diagrams and aroused clitoral dimensions helpfully included.

Thinking about current controversies related to the Infamous Florida Bill and related matters happening in other states and localities, my point stands.

Normal adults would prefer to get wisdom teeth removed without anesthesia than talk to other people’s children of any age about sex.

As I said back then:

(And the examples were not made up – they were taken from the Father Ryan curriculum materials)

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I just want to focus on something else.

The weirdness.

Maybe just distance yourself from this for a minute. Pretend that you don’t know anything about culture wars, Catholic or otherwise, or that you don’t have a stake in any of these issues.

Now. Consider this.

Consider the possibility that it’s a little …weird for an adult to stand in front of a group of young teen boys and girls and teach this material:

CLITORIS a) This is the most sexually sensitive part of the female body. It corresponds to the glans or head of the penis. b) Though there is no reproductive purpose, the clitoris is made of erectile tissue and contains a high concentration of erotic neural receptors and blood vessels. c) When flaccid or unaroused the tissue is c.1” long; when aroused, it swells to 2” to 3”.

Not weird in a counter-cultural Albanian-nun-picks-up-dying-poor-from-Calcutta-streets kind of way.

More like…what adult in their right mind wants to talk to other people’s 14-year old kids about the clitoris? kind of weird.

And more like…with all the fascinating things to learn about the world that will help kids find a unique way to help make the world a better place, YES let’s spend time on the mechanics of sexual activity with 14-year olds kind of weird.

(Imagine you are a parent of a teen. And then you stand up in front of your kid and his or friends and give this lesson.

GLANS 1. Located at the tip or head of the penis is a structure which contains a highly concentrated amount of neural receptors sensitive to stimulus; it is the center of sexual pleasure for the male.

That would be weird of you. Your kids would die. You might even get arrested.

And no nonsense about “What they already know” and “what they see on their smartphones.”  No kidding. And you think this helps? 

It’s not weird at all to want to help kids navigate this culture and their own desires and questions. It’s not weird to want to share the Good News of the truth about sexuality in a reasoned, understanding, realistic way. It’s really important to do this, as a matter of fact.

But again…context. Which is SCHOOL. Required attendance. Grades. Mixed gender groups.

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And now I will add –

…other people’s kids

….with a widespread code of omerta when it comes to letting parents know what you’re talking to your kids about.

But then….

What is normal:

To be faced with a classroom – a world – of hurting kids and to be moved to pity and convicted of the urgency of helping them.

What I really do think, though, is that despite the undeniable truth of this: school and the classroom is not the place to try to live out this mission, except in the most general way.

For a classroom is not neutral ground.

It’s a place of coercion and a place where children and young people are told, every day, day after day, that survival and success in that place is a matter of doing and repeating back what they are told.

It’s a place where, in the younger grades, adults are revered and almost worshipped. How many of us, as parents, have ruefully reflected on the fact that Junior would probably clean the whole house if Miss Kelsey Kindergarten Teacher told him too, while for us, picking up his toys leads to World War III?

The classroom is not neutral ground. Teachers and school systems have all the power, and as much as some educators are moved by a deep desire to fix all the broken kids, they just might have to come to the conclusion that most experienced educators reached by Christmas break of their first year: It can’t be done. You can’t teach everything and you can’t fix everything. You have to decide what’s possible and try to do your best.

And you have to do what’s appropriate.

What’s appropriate in a classroom setting, no matter what grade?

Respecting the diversity of your students and their home lives.

Respecting their and their families’ privacy.

Respecting the fact that you have no idea how your well-intentioned actions get translated and remembered in a students’ mind.

Respecting the undeserved power that you have, especially in the younger grades.

And finally – being deeply aware of your own Stuff, and being careful not to impose that Stuff on the kids. It’s called professionalism.

One of the problems with contemporary pedagogy, though – and just contemporary epistemological assumptions in general – is that since we have dispensed with the objective and the transcendent, what we are left with is the interpersonal. This is one of my constant themes in relations to Catholic Matters, and it holds here.

Why in the world is it seen as so essential for teachers to be able to “be themselves” and share details of their personal lives with students?

Partly because this has become the essence of knowledge – passing on, not cultural wisdom, but my personal experience to you. Witnessing, not educating.

In a sense, there is nothing new here. In my experience there are a couple of basic types of teachers – at least at the high school level – those who are in the business because they love their subject matter, and those who are in it because they “love the kids.” And, sorry to be cruel, but it always seemed to me that a great many of the latter were simply determined to never leave the high school experience behind.

And so it seems to me that in this present moment of educators frantically and aggressively insisting on the vital importance of them being able to center the classroom experience on their own personal values and lives, we’ve got the worst of the worst, since the “subject matter” cohort has been driven out, not only by the pedagogical trends, but by standardized curricula and testing regimes which have rendered them little more than test-prep robots.

So here we are.

Finally, consider your life as an adult, as an adult who presumably has interactions with children and young people.

Do you or any of the adults that you know want to talk to other people’s kids about either sexual matters or even your own personal lives? Is making sure that any kids in your circle understand you or even know what you did last weekend important?

Is it even normal for a 40-year old to want a bunch of 11-year olds to “know who I really am?” much less to want to dig into their personal lives?

Um, no.

It would seem to me that after decades of discussing how the “fun mom” and the “cool coach” and the “drama teacher who lets us hang out at his apartment” and the “priest who drinks beer with us” are all basically emotionally arrested groomers and often abusers – we would be determined to insist on more walls between the adults who care for and educate young people and their charges, not fewer.

As I said before, we can moved – and moved to action – by a deep concern for young people, but the way those issues are addressed and those young people are helped?

The classroom, with its particular power dynamic, is not the place to do it. And people who aggressively insist that it is are strange.

Education can certainly have a personal dimension, but it is – and should be – a dimension that is characterized by tension and self-awareness because young people are vulnerable and educators have power.

Part 2