Small town America is growing up fast, or at least in one small community, where little kids – as young as five and six – will get free condoms when the school year begins this September.
Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA, surrounded by Cape Cod Bay and the Atlantic ocean is anything but a sleepy town, since the local school created a controversial policy, where any elementary-age child requesting condoms will be given them free, with or without parental support.
Children won’t just be handed the condoms, the school will provide educational information about safe sex, but then they will be handed the condoms, no questions asked.
Many parents have complained, some even writing letters formally requesting their children not be given condoms if they ask. However, the Provincetown school board was ready for this – the new policy clearly states that parents are not allowed to ask that their children be excluded from free the condoms on request policy.
Despite parents angered by this, the school board claims they are not in favour of students having sex, but they are also not in favour of kids being denied birth control.
Starting in September, any of the 66 kids in high school and 89 kids in the lower grades can get condoms if they ask, without their parents ever knowing – the school board’s policy is to provide education and condoms, but they won’t be keeping a list of those who request and receive the free condoms. And they will not report back to parents that their son or daughter has requested and received birth control.
Is it up to school boards or shouldn’t parents take a more active role in their kid’s development?
Granted, sitting across from your son or daughter and having a heart-to-heart about sex isn’t comfortable or easy. But being a parent isn’t always comfortable or easy period.
When your son accidentally crashes the car, or your daughter comes home well past her curfew, you talk to them. Why can’t you talk to them about sex?
Sex is everywhere in our de-sensitized overhyped world. From billboards and night club signs, to advertisements on television and radio, to the wild and crazy Internet, where the porn industry makes more money than all sales – including porn – on eBay.
In this de-sensitized overhyped world, parents have forgotten just how visible sex is, and now a small town in the States is taking steps to protect their kids, from that parental mistake.
When is the right age to teach about the birds and the bees in school?
Some say never – they believe parents should teach these things to their kids themselves. Others thank their local school boards, because they fear getting into an awkward and uncomfortable frank discussion with their own child.
In Canada’s largest province of Ontario, the politicians were thinking first grade was a good age to begin.
Public uneasiness about having kids barely weaned off of Barney learning about the differences between boys and girls has since led the provincial government to rethink the proposed new policy, delaying its implementation.
The proposed policy would have introduced sexual identity orientation in grade three, learning about masturbation in grade six, and lessons about anal and oral sex in grades seven and eight.
So, who is right and who is wrong? When are kids too young to learn about this stuff? When is it too late?
The problem isn’t so much a thing of age and time, but lack of cooperation between parents and public institutions.
Kids are naturally curious, and with technologies like smart phones, the Internet and our ever expanding digital television universe, they are going to explore and discover sex and other adult subjects eventually on their own – regardless of all the parental protections put in place.
It is better that kids learn about sex from a parent or teacher, than from flipping on a porn video at a friend’s house.
But then, how are you going to prevent your son or daughter from catching a porno at a friend’s place? You can’t be everywhere – can you?
You can forbid your child from playing at friends places, but then your children won’t develop the social skills they need to live happy, healthy lives.
Maybe instead of having specific classroom sessions on sex, each school board should have sex educators on staff. It would be no different from the child psychologists, developmental specialists, and other specialists many school boards already retain.
So that faithful day, when you learn that the reason your son has been spending so much time over at the Jone’s is because they have the porn channels available all the time, you can talk to your kid’s teacher about seeing the school’s sex educator.
And the school’s sex educator would work with you, your kid, and your teacher, to properly provide the information and counseling for all parties concerned.
That’s the real solution to sex education – it is a partnership with parents, their kids and their teachers.
I remember way back when I was a kid in school, on a day like today I’d be a bundle of raw energy, just itching for the clock to buzz it’s last alert for the week – and for the next two weeks – as today marks the start of March Break across much of Canada.
Back then, all the school boards across the province were pretty much unanimous in their timing of the annual spring break. All the school boards in the province gave us two weeks off, all starting at the same time.
For me and my brother, the March Break meant two weeks of lounging around the house, sleeping in, and fighting over who got to watch what on the big TV in the living room.
Some did a typically Canadian thing – they packed up and flew to warmer climates, to enjoy a spring break away from the Canadian winter chill.
The March Break was a well deserved vacation – two weeks to rejuvenate and refresh our minds, bodies, and souls.
Even if you didn’t go anywhere or do anything really significant, it was a pleasant time to just take a break.
These days, March Break has been reduced to a mere week. Kids in school these days have such jam-packed schedules, school boards have become stingy in their allowances of time off.
One of the downsides to our technologically advanced world which surprisingly gets little coverage is the pressure it puts on educators and kids.
When I was a kid, they only had two computer classes – basic computing and advanced computing – and both were only offered as electives in high school. The computer classes were taught on what are now ancient relics, the original IBM PC running at a turtle-blasting speed of 4.77 Mhz. These days, if you find one of these monsters of a machine it would be best used as a paperweight than anything else.
Kids these days don’t get basic or advanced computing classes as electives – they learn this stuff as part of their regular curriculum. Many even learn some of the more advanced programs I use every day as part of my job: Adobe PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, and MS-Office.
When I did a presentation in school, I’d often have a handful of scribbled hand written notes, as I improvised much of what I said. These days, even the teeniest tiniest kids are creating highly graphical PowerPoint slide shows, with music, video and animated elements for their school presentations.
The computer revolution – contrary to what was thought at its onset – has not reduced the amount of paper used, it hasn’t created a society of typing mindless drones blindly following unimaginative corrupt business leaders (well that depends where you work), and it certainly hasn’t given us shorter work weeks, longer weekends, or more time off to pursue personal passions.
What the computer revolution has done is create a society which needs to be up and running from day one.
When I was a kid, the closest thing we had to a computer in the house was a typewriter – until the 1980’s when computers were just starting to make their way into the home. Back then, I released my creative juices building imaginary towns with Lego building blocks, racing toy cars down imaginary roads, drawing imaginary worlds, and filling them with imaginary characters using crayons, finger paints, paper and glue.
These days, kids blend their imaginations into technology – creating PowerPoints for school, well shot, edited and produced videos they upload to YouTube, or even just “texting” their thoughts to their friends over their Blackberry. Why a kid needs a Blackberry is still beyond me – when I was a kid, I’d be lucky if my parents gave me change for the pay phone . . .
Kids these days have learned how to blend technologies we never had before, into their daily lives.
But all of this – and more – has created a society where schools are forced to teach more than reading, writing and arithmetic.
Or more to the point, educators have had to embrace the new technologies, to teach the basics, or else the kids of today – which are literally born into the information age – wouldn’t understand what the teacher is teaching.
Sure, you can still use colored blocks to teach kids how to count, but they may lose interest, and stop listening unless those colored blocks were animated on a computer screen.
So why then, at a time when technology has put even more pressure on educators and kids alike, have many school boards cut the March Break down by a week?
Ironically it is the very same reason we need a break – the demands of technology.
It is the technology used by kids, and the need for educators to constantly stay one step ahead of kids by learning how to use these technologies, which means school years are all the more impacted to keep up with it all.
As the latest advances constantly enter our lives – three-dimensional HDTV systems are due out next week – that just adds to the wealth of technical-know how we’re expected to use.
Educators in Canada’s largest city must like jar collections, because they certainly are turning the school system into one.
A jar collection is a mix-mash of stuff you can put into a jar, one jar for each item. Some collectors have different jams, others bottle caps, the point is everything gets put in its own jar. Nice and neat, and nothing interacts with the stuff in the other jars.
That’s just what the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) – Canada’s largest public school board – is doing to solve their child rearing problems. Black kids not getting along with the other kids? No problem, TDSB created a black only school. This idea originated ironically just as the United S
tates of America swore in their first black president, showing how far race relations have come in the States. We Canadians can learn a thing or two from our neighbors to the south.
The current problem the TDSB is trying to solve using their separate, isolate and divide mentality is immigration. There is a school in the city’s north-east end in a neighborhood where immigration is so high, they haven’t room for the 600-plus kindergarten-aged children. So, the TDBS has raised the notion of creating a kindergarten only school, just to accommodate all the newcomer’s kids to this country.
It is one thing to keep your strawberry jam in one bottle, so as to not mix it with your grape jelly. It is quite another to separate young kids of different ages, ethnic backgrounds and cultural heritages.
By separating kids on these levels, they don’t interact – and learn and grow – with these kids from different ages, ethnic backgrounds and cultural heritages. And that fosters hate, racism and bigotry, which are traits which should not be a part of any country’s cultural fabric, let alone a country that prides itself on welcoming people from all nations, such as Canada.
The TDSB may disguise this racist segregation using weasel words such as “black focused school,” or practical arguments such as the fact that they have over 600 kids in one grade, where normally they have maybe 60 to 100 kids in that one grade. But let’s be crystal clear – they are separating kids from all other cultures, and isolating them in their own schools.
Having a “black focused school” is pretty obvious, but the same thing is being done with the immigrant children. Yes the kindergarten classes are standi
ng-room only full, but the immigrants tend to all be from one cultural group. So intentional or not, once again the TDSB will be separating kids from one specific ethnic group, from everyone else.
A more traditionally Canadian solution would be to break up the kindergarten among other schools in nearby communities, placing kids in other schools across a geographic radius. But the TDSB is following the current trends of racial segregation and cultural divides.
One of the biggest on-going problems in Canada has been the segregation of cultural communities.
Over twenty-years ago, Canada really was a cultural mosaic. The streets were humming with kids from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, playing, learning and growing up together. I remember growing up, playing tag with the other kids in the neighborhood – I always seemed to be “it.” I knew my next door neighbors were Italian, the kids from across the street were Polish, there was a family from the Ukraine, and a few other global villages represented by the other kids. I never really noticed when I was a kid growing up, back then, I was just a geeky little boy, trying to catch one of the other kids so I wouldn’t still be “it.”
The families of these children for the most part got along with their neighbors, embracing the various cultural differences, learning and growing from one another. All the parents looked out for each other’s kids. If a kid scraped his or her knee, it didn’t matter which house he or she went too, the band-aids weren’t cultural-specific, and the parents didn’t care what color the kid’s skin was. They just did what any good parent would do, by mending the kid’s knee, offering a smile and some kind words to make the hurt go away.
Not any more – walk into many a Canadian neighborhood these days and you’ll know instantly what ethnic or cultural part of town you are in. We have China Town, Little Italy, the Greek Village – but we don’t have that once wonderful and amazing Canadian street where cultural ethnicity does not matter, and the kids and parents learn, love and laugh together regardless of the accent of the laugh, or the color of the skin.
I miss that Canada – because that was – and should still be – what it really means to be Canadian.
Jordan H. Green began his never-ending journey for life-long learning while writing for the campus paper in university.
From student protests, to student politics, he eventually discovered his passion for knowledge -- and even more importantly, that he could write.
And write he did, for major big city dailies, small town weeklies, monthly magazines, even doing on-air work in television and radio -- Jordan mastered the media.
Jokingly calling this blog his place to "bitch and moan" he's once again mastering the media -- this time that new fangled thing called "the net."
Enjoy.
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