Won't Somebody Think of our Children

So Ontario is updating its sex education curriculum. 

Predictably, parents marched on Queen's Park to protest the fact that government was interfering too much in the role of parents and should not take over their responsibility.  According to the Toronto Star parents had issues with the following items [My imagined placards for the protest in brackets]:

• Grade 1 - learning proper names of your body [Pee Pee 4 Life]
 
• Grade 3-  learning about same-sex relationships [Everyone is Awesome ...except "you" people over there, but I am not homophobic. I have lots of gay friends.  I just prefer that my child doesn't learn anything about them or that they are deserving of equal treatment. I mean I believe in teaching people about equality of race, religion and all that.  But come on this is a  bridge too far.  I mean we can't teach our children to respect gay people because that would be undermine my marriage.  Why you ask? Um....well... I would love to answer that, but my hand is getting tired from holding this giant sign] 
• Grade 6 - answering (when prompted) about masturbation  [Don't ask.  Don't touch]
 
• Grade 7 - learning that anal and oral sex also carries a risk of STDs [What I don't want to know can't hurt me]

Now I know you may think from my acerbic tone that I do not agree with the parents.  You would be wrong.

 

Now I do believe that sex education is like math and all our children should have basic rudimentary understanding of certain things.  All our children should know that 1+1 might equal 3 if we don't plan ahead, that the square root of 4761 can be fantastic and the answer to the age old brain teaser:

 

"If train A leaves Dorset station at 9:00 pm going east at 72 mph and Train B leaves Avon Station at 9:30 going west at 86 mph, what is the failure rate of the condom worn by the couple doing it in the dining car washroom?"
 

However, the parents are right that the government has no place educating our children about sex.   I mean have you seen our math scores (proven by the fact that you didn't know that the square root of 4761 is 69).  

 

I propose a more elegant solution.  Think of it as a more formalized "learn it from the schoolyards". 

 

Each young child will be paired with an older student who has experienced "it" before.   By "it" I mean that thing that you do when you like like a person.  This will be an updated "reading buddy" program.  I call it "sex buddies", but agree that the name could use a little work.

 

My program has several elements.  Each is critical to its success.

 

First, the match will be totally random.  It will essentially be luck of the draw.  We might pair a homosexual youth with the most bigoted homophobe out there.  This would inevitably lead to a healthy debate where each side feels their views are being heard and respected. Or potentially suicide.

 

Second, there will be no formal education for anyone in the buddy program.  We won't ensure that the buddy knows anything about sexual transmitted diseases, the concept of consent, sexting or anything else of substance.  The only important point is that they are older.  We won't even check to make sure that they believe in equality of sexes or sexual orientation.  All of that stuff will just sort itself out in the wash.  

 

Third, we won't schedule any actual meetings and we won't monitor the program effectiveness at all.  We want this to be an organic thing.  Now I know you may be worried that this may lead to no actual meetings.  I trust that the buddies will be really excited to discuss this thing that they may be ashamed to talk about.   

 

Finally, there will be no accountability.  No one will be able to ask anything of anyone involved in the program because it is none of our business.  It is purely between the child and their buddy.

 

Essentially, my program will ensure that our children's knowledge of a critical part of life (and the cause of many potential problems in adolescence) will be taught to them by someone with no formal training, with potentially all kinds of bias and with no oversight by anyone. 

 

Now I know you may think that this program is essentially the same as having the parent teach the child, but my program is better.  I mean talking with your child about sex... awkward.  If only there were educated professionals who were trained to teach our kids about important things in a manner that fostered learning and inclusiveness with regulated oversight.  But we don't live in such a wonderful utopia.  We have to deal with the real world.

 

I mean it worked for us, so it will work for our kids, right?   Anyways, if it didn't work for us it won't matter.  Without formalized sex-education we will be the ones teaching our children all of our failings and misinformation.  This is the circular logic of life.

 

Just don't blame the internet, MTV or society when your child gets a sexual transmitted disease because they didn't know how to prevent it.

 

You only have yourself to blame.  

 

 

 

Moments...

So yes it has been a long while.  I had things to do.  Get over it/Welcome back. 

Recently, I watched two movies that were very different.  "Boyhood" and "Into the Woods".  One was bad.  One was about as good as you could make a movie based on the material. 

Both dealt with moments.

The first was Boyhood.  Let me start by saying I love the director Richard Linklater.  I love the Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy and also am a big fan of Waking Life and Dazed and Confused.  So I was very primed to see this.  It had gotten rave reviews and is the presumptive favorite to win the Oscar for best picture.  So it was the good one right?

It was horrible.

The only thing it had going for it was the fact that it was shot over like 15 years so we get to see the young boy and his sister age before our eyes.  The problem was there was no story to go along with it.  Okay I know what you are thinking.  The point was that  you got to see little moments of the life of the boy growing up and get a sense of who he is.

But you didn't.  I didn't feel I knew the character at all.  In fact the moments were so clichéd it was ridiculous.  Alcoholic father throwing glasses.  Check.  Family moving around.  Check.  Kid struggling against authority and being told what to do.  Check.   There was a scene where the kid literally sit and stared at a dead sparrow.  Are you fucking kidding me?

There is one scene in the movie is so ridiculously pathetic that it defies description (but I am going to try anyways).  At one point the mother needs a septic line replaced.  The worker who is Mexican is digging up the pipe and is nice and good at his job.  There is this pause in everything going on and the mother says he should consider going to community college and that he is smart and this is something he could do to make his life better.  Like the true Checkov's gun that this was, years later at just the right time when the mother is giving her kids advice guess who shows up as the manager at a restaurant, after having worked his way through community college and having had his whole life turned around by this one casual conversation.  You guessed it.  It was ridiculous and truly unreal. 

Also, the "boy" couldn't act.  This is to be expected when you cast a 4 year old and hope for the best.  But he just wasn't any good.  But everyone is so enamored with the fact that this took 15 years to film that they neglect that what was filmed is not that good.  The film had no point.  It had no message.  In the end it literally ends by saying life is a series of moments and pans up into the sky.  

This lead me to think of the other movie I watched over the Christmas Break - Into the Woods.  I love this musical.  It is Stephen Sondheim at his lyrical best. 

However, I thought that the movie would be horrible (see my thoughts on Les Miz in another column).  I cringed at Johnny Depp and Meryl Strep being cast.  I wondered if Disney would let the film be as dark as it is and allow the wolf to seriously be the child predator he needs to be when stalking little red riding hood. 

I shouldn't have been worried.  While it wasn't perfect it was about as good as you could do with the material in a non-live setting.  It was remarkably restrained in a way Les Miz was not.  The acting was terrific, the singing was good and there is one scene (where two princes try to out do each other) which was about as perfectly cast and staged as it could have been.

However, Richard Linklater should have listened to one of the songs in Into the Woods.  At one point in the movie near the end one of the character notes that:

           "Oh. If life were made of moments,
            Even now and then a bad one!
            But if life were only moments,
            Then you'd never know you had one."

That was the problem with Boyhood.  It was only moments.  It wasn't story.  It wasn't life.