Ontario’s Sex-Ed Wars and the Future of Public Education
Shortly after being elected, Ontario’s right-populist Premier Doug Ford announced an unusual policy: the province’s schools were to change their sexual education curriculum, repealing a 2015 update that included topics such as sexting and gender identity. It was a move that was regressive in the most literal sense of the word, seeking to peel back two decades of social progress and retreat to a time when the straight mainstream could ignore and shame those who existed outside of it.
Conservative discontent with the new sex-ed curriculum had begun as a fringe movement but quickly moved towards the conservative mainstream. Social conservatives ran in byelections under the “Stop the New Sex Ed Agenda” banner. Alt-right gadfly Jordan Peterson used the new curriculum as an example of cultural Marxism run amok. In the 2018 Ontario PC leadership race, party outsider Tanya Granic Allen ran on a platform centred on changing sex ed, and received 15%. The eventual winner Ford ran mostly on vague promises of economic growth, slashes in government pending, and attacks on his rivals instead of a socially conservative stance which remains unpopular in Canada. But it’s clear he views the Granic-esque reactionaries as a key part of his base, and this curriculum decision was their reward for supporting him.
The far right’s fixation on sex-ed was always a not particularly subtle attack on Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne’s sexuality. Wynne, an open lesbian, was fitted into the old narrative of LGBT people corrupting the youth, a narrative used to justify discrimination and homophobic violence. In a broader sense, the curriculum stood in for a world that was more sexually permissive and accepting of queer people, and one in which conservatism was no longer able to control major social institutions. The solution was then to use schools to rewind social progress back to a time before Canada legalized same-sex marriage and began introducing protections for transgendered people.
I went through health class in Ontario under the old curriculum. There was some useful information, but the overwhelming theme of the class was that of prohibition. Sex and drugs were both frightening things best avoided — the only 100% safe method, we were told, was abstinence. We learned little about female bodies, or our own, but were given an encyclopedic summary of sexually transmitted diseases. The only mention of consent was when our teacher incredulously informed us that we could be arrested for rape even if we were drunk too. It was not the ideological nightmare of abstinence-only education we heard about in America, but the overwhelming focus was on convincing students to stay out of trouble instead of helping them deal with their emerging desires.
It is questionable what Ford’s edict will actually mean for Ontario classrooms. Individual teachers still have a degree of autonomy, and some school boards have said they will still teach the 2015 curriculum. In the bumbling fashion typical of right-populists, the party has issued conflicting directives, leading to general confusion ahead of the start of a new school year. And in terms of effects on the student body, there was never really any guarantee that teaching tolerance would make teenager more tolerant, any more than teaching abstinence made them more abstinent.
But Ford’s decision is significant. It signals to queer adolescents that the government is indifferent at best to them, and would really rather they disappear. It allows misinformation about sex and gender to circulate, and reinforces bigoted narratives about LGBT education as being akin to sexual abuse. Health class is an unlikely place to find solace, but if any youth did find some kind of recognition in the 2015 curriculum, it’s gone now. Moreover, this change suggests a coming wave of struggles over the content of public education, a struggle that has already been fought in various districts but could now break into the mainstream.
To the extent that education can be seen as a neutral public good, like roads or water, it must rest on a shared set of beliefs and values. In the postwar period, where Western media created a relatively hegemonic worldview, this consensus was at least apparently possible. Struggles over education were largely struggles to grant access to women and racial minorities. The hegemonic curriculum was what Althusser meant when he described schools as an ideological state apparatus, reproducing the seemingly taken-for-granted world view that informed society. Radical educators and thinkers have called attention to the omissions of what was the consensus curriculum, whether it be the elision of imperialism and labour history in history classes or the dominance of white men in the English literary canon. But it was precisely the absence of radical, disruptive elements in the curriculum that allowed governments to look on public education as having undisputed value.
However, in the contemporary period the ease of spreading information and misinformation, as well as the collapse of postwar liberalism, has eroded the ideological hegemony on which public education rested. The “fake news” crisis has suggested that we can no longer agree on a consensus present, let alone a consensus history. As such, conservative activists have targeted school curricula, whether it be over the teaching of evolution and climate change in science classes or mentions of racial and class oppression in history lessons. Drastic swings, such as those made by the Ford government, will only become more common in the future. It is possibly to imagine a time not long form now when schools keep two sets of textbooks, one for when the right is in power and one for when they aren’t.
This is one area where the results of elections do have a large effect, so much of the resistance to programs of intentional ignorance such as Ford’s will have to take place through conventional electioneering. Labour efforts, such as the recent teacher strikes in West Virginia and Oklahoma, could also be used to resist curriculum changes. After all, the image of teachers as predatory ideologues feeds nicely into government attempts to reduce their labour power. But perhaps the most immediate task for progressives is to make sure that correct, useful information on sexuality and messages of tolerance and acceptance are as widely disseminated and easily available as possible.
