Sex Education, Parental Rights, and Teacher Impartiality

Événement bimodal (en anglais) | Salle R-3680, Pavillon des sciences de la gestion de l’UQAM et Zoom | Inscrivez-vous (sans frais) en remplissant le formulaire au bas de cette page pour réserver votre place.

Sex Education, Parental Rights, and Teacher Impartiality:
A comparative look at the sexuality education component of Quebec’s Culture and Citizenship curriculum and Ontario’s Human Development and Sexual Health curriculum

This presentation offers two complementary perspectives on the social and legal controversies generated by mandatory sexuality education in public schools. In the first part of the presentation, Lauren Bialystok analyses Quebec’s recently introduced sexuality education curriculum in light of a conception of sexuality education, developed and defended in her previous scholarly work with Lisa Andersen, called Democratic Humanistic Sexuality Education. She then overviews the public controversies surrounding Ontario’s own recent experiment with mandatory sexuality education with an eye to anticipating the points of public contention to which Quebec’s sexuality education curriculum will likely give rise—namely, concerns about parental rights and religious freedom, and public hysteria around a hidden “gay agenda.” In the second part of the presentation, Bruce Maxwell considers what curriculum planners can do to shelter mandatory sexuality education from constitutional challenges. Drawing on the jurisprudence on mandatory religious education, he argues that the key to ensuring that mandatory sexuality education curriculum is compatible with the basic rights at stake—i.e., the right to parental oversight over moral education and the right to freedom of conscience and religion—is to craft and implement content that is descriptive, respectful, and explicitly pursues legitimate overriding educational aims.

Conférencier.e.s
Lauren Bialystok, OISE, University of Toronto
Bruce Maxwell, Université de Montréal

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