The provincial Scottish government drafted school age education guidelines towards the end of last year that continue to secularize the concepts of marriage, parenting, health and sexual education, also known by their acronym RSHP or RSHPE.
At this point in time Scotland appears to be operating more or less as its own country despite the fact that an independence vote is still several months away. Certainly the province is implementing far more unique thought than would now be seen or permitted by an American State.
New guidance rules in education, according to Scotland for Marriage and the Christian Institute, will enforce that children be taught certain aspects of sex education in other classes despite parents removing them from formal lessons on the topic. The guidance also removes reference to children learning about the value placed on marriage by religious groups and others in Scottish society. Teachers who have concerns about the issue will not be protected.
The initial draft of the regulations says: “Aspects of RSHP education may be discussed in many areas of the curriculum and it would not be possible for a child or young person to be withdrawn from lessons across the curriculum as this would prevent a child or young person receiving an adequate and holistic education. (Schools are) expected to meet the experiences and outcomes of the curriculum for a child even if that child is withdrawn from a particular lesson”.
According to Wikipedia holistic education is “a philosophy of education based on the premise that each person finds identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to the community, to the natural world, and to humanitarian values such as compassion and peace.”
Another way of describing this is plain liberal atheism. Christian values are based around finding meaning in life via relationship with the creator. The Scottish holistic education aims to eliminate references to God, the traditional family and any kind of non-socialist political thought, presenting only utopian liberalism as a fair and just way forward.
Scotland for Marriage, a coalition group defending traditional marriage, hit back with its own statement. “The new draft sex education guidance is a real shocker, and shows where things are heading. (The guidelines represent) a significant liberalising of the sex education guidance, a failure to respect those who come from a faith or otherwise traditionalist background, and shocking contempt for the rights of parents. The Scottish Government should go back to the drawing board, and write sex education guidance which reflects the whole of Scottish society rather than the trendy metropolitan elite”.
But a government spokesman responded with: “(schools can) ensure that pupils have an understanding of a variety of beliefs and opinions, and use this to encourage confident, capable young people who can form healthy, respectful relationships with others”.
Again what the government is saying is that the school system is going to impose a kaleidoscope of liberal belief on all children to the point where they will be expected to accept it lest it fail their conceptual holistic test. It reminds us a bit of Winston Smith at the very end who had to, by state coercion, come to believe that Big Brother was good, regardless of the evidence he had come to understand.
Caroline Lynch, Chair of the Scottish Secular Society, said last November: “It is difficult when there are competing rights to consider to find the correct balance. In this case, it is the child who will bear the consequences of our inaction, consequences which are often lifelong, and can be very severe. As such, we feel it is only correct that we support the rights of the child to a proper education, in the knowledge that in doing so, we enable them to act responsibly and guard their own health.”
This is the kind of thinking that creates one government mess after another. Progressive busybodies who think that government should be the only ones to address anything believe that government must act every time some kind of deviance from liberalism is identified. Unfortunately Ms. Lynch will not succeed in teaching children to ‘act responsibly and guard their health’ because this is the role of the parents and the family.
A recent poll by the anti-domestic violence charity Zero Tolerance, conducted amongst 14-19 year olds finds that many are not finding the answers in school and are instead turning to the internet to find information and direction. This means that they are finding the good, the bad and the ugly but the survey misses the point.
The Scottish government, nanny state extraordinaire, keeps believing it has to interject itself into situations to save the children. In fact it is their continual interjection that causes many of the problems and until they back away their solutions will only antagonize an already bad situation.
