The Alberta Teachers’ Association

One of the difficulties I have encountered in writing this editorial is that frankly, most of what I am about to relate to you is beyond belief. This should not be entirely surprising as it deals with the implementation of the educational provisions of Bill 44, one of the most unbelievable pieces of legislation to emerge from under the Dome in recent years.

When those provisions come into effect on September 1, school boards will be required to give parents advance notice of any instructional activities relating primarily and explicitly to religion, human sexuality or sexual orientation, and to permit parents to exclude their children from such activities without academic penalty.

My objective here to have you share with me some of the discussions I participated in along with a bevy of lawyers and assorted other representatives from Alberta Education, Justice and the Alberta School Boards Association as we considered how best to limit the damage the Bill could do. To preclude the need for intrusive interruptions, I am proposing to tag the remainder of this editorial with the following symbols. A * will indicate content that’s “enhanced” for effect; a † will denote material that’s enhanced to the point of fiction, and a ‡ will indicate the god’s honest truth, no matter how absurd it may sound.

The objective of our meetings was to determine whether we could, in policy, exclude from the effect of Bill 44 entire swaths of the program of studies on the grounds that the subject matter contained nothing that would trigger the application of the bill‡. In fact, when we went through the program of studies, there were few courses whose contents dealt “primarily and explicitly” with the subject matter of the bill. Where such content was covered, for example in the human sexuality components of health and CALM 20, there were notification requirements that had been in place long before Bill 44 was a gleam in some backbencher’s eye.

Some courses, however, would still be problematic. Based on our discussions, it appears that the provisions introduced by the bill would require schools to send a note to parents of students enrolled in courses such as World Religions 30 indicating that the courses deal with, you guessed it, religion‡. It was also observed that Catholic and alternative-faith-based schools would be required to provide similar advisories concerning their programming‡. This strikes me as being on par with a safety notice that is supposed to have appeared on a bag of peanuts: “Warning: May contain peanuts!”* 

Getting to the issue of sex, it was pointed out that the government had thoughtfully amended Bill 44 as it worked its way through the legislature to add the word “human” before “sexuality”‡—despite their reservations about human hanky-panky, the bill’s promoters were apparently comfortable with classroom discussion of the love life of orchids or bonobos*. (For the benefit of readers who do not subscribe to the National Geographic Channel, orchids are the perverts of the plant kingdom‡ and the sexual practices of bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, resemble something that might be observed on free- margarita night at Club Med‡.) 

As entertaining as the thought might be, rewriting the Alberta Program of Studies from a Planet of the Apes perspective was not really a viable option†, so I proposed differentiating between “sex,” which would not be covered by the bill, and “human sexuality, which would be‡. Hoping to save biology teachers across the province pointless paperwork, I argued that “If it deals with plumbing, it’s sex; if it deals with positions, it’s sexuality.”‡ It follows that, in the context of biology, human reproduction was a matter relating to sex and hence should fall outside the scope of the legislation‡. 

The outcomes of these tortured discussions and others relating to the bill’s potential application to learning resources and instructional practices were all fed into the machinery of government, there to be duly considered and transformed into policy. The results, however, will become apparent only when the government’s Guide to Education for 2010/11 is released (hopefully, in the next week or so). What the final implications will be for teachers and school boards remains uncertain—if you think that the workings of sex and religion are mysterious, I can assure you they have nothing on government‡.