This is a big deal. It is about what rights parents have in the curriculum. I for one believe that math, science, language arts and social studies are key areas for study and that parents should for the most part stay out of the curriculum. However, when the curriculum starts encroaching on social or society issues, that to me is where parents should have a say. What if the schools started teaching how to be a mass murderer or that there is no such thing as God. I know it is a crazy analogy, but the point I am making is that there are some areas where the parents need to lead the teaching and the school has no rights to circumvent those areas.
Some religious groups think homosexuality is a sin. Does the school have the right to teach their children what the school believes versus what the parent believes. NO.
I don’t think schools should be teaching that there is no god, because we can’t say that to a definite certainty, but they should absolutely be teaching that there is no evidence for a god if we’re going to address religion at all in a science class.
School curriculum should stick to the facts and the truths in science, math, history. That’s a little bit trickier in arts subjects that aren’t necessarily dealing with objective fact, so my argument there would be that they should lean on curriculum that covers work based on its influence moreso than its subject. Similar with certain elements of history since inevitably you’re going to have to pick and choose what you teach. Certainly some elements of religion will come into that and while I would clearly not support teaching religion in schools, it is also important to teach that religion exists and the impact that it has had on history/society/culture etc.
Same is true for me with sexuality. I don’t generally support teaching sexuality beyond the facts of the existence of such sexuality. Homosexuals exists, transexuals exist, drag queens exist and I don’t think its wrong to teach the basic facts around these sexualities (drag queens kind of fall into an odd category because that isn’t a sexuality or a gender or anything really, it more appropriately falls under theater or maybe cultural studies).
I suppose the primary question being asked is at what age are various topics appropriate. Teaching sex education in 4th grade seems early to me, when I was growing up that started around the 7th-8th grade which seems to make more sense. However, I also have to acknowledge that children are just in general exposed to all kinds of things at much earlier ages due to the proliferation of the internet and its entirely possible that a 4th grader would now have a similar level of knowledge about sexuality that I had as an 8th grader.
I guess my argument would be: why even have teachers and people whose job it is to design curriculum if we aren’t going to let them actually do this job without interference? Isn’t the whole point of someone studying education so that they can be experts in the exact question of what subjects are appropriate for which age groups and how to best teach that subject? Isn’t that what we trust someone who has been in the education field for their entire career to be able to put together?
I would argue that the real problem with many, many things in our society today - including in education - is that for some reason everyone believes everyone else is acting in bad faith. There is this weird paranoia that everyone is acting with some agenda to harm and I’m willing to bet that’s probably not the case 99% of the time, but this paranoia actually makes it easier for those that are acting in bad faith to implement change that is harmful - speaking on a large scale here, not just specific to this or other education arguments.
Parents have the right to teach their children just about anything they want to inside the home, parents do not have the right to determine what is taught to everyone else’s children in publicly funded schools. We have to trust that all people - educators, parents, students - are acting in good faith or else our society will crumble into, well, what its currently crumbling into.