As you probably know, I wanted the Ethics and Religious Culture course to be ended and replaced with a course focused on citizenship. It’s done. And those responsible for its design worked very well. Hat. Judge for yourself. Here is the program for primary and secondary.
But. Because there are buts.
School is a special institution
To get there, we must remember and seriously take into account the things that make school such a special institution.
We transmit knowledge, we socialize, we qualify, of course. But we are aimed at children and young people. We must be careful not to make them adhere unconditionally to ideas or practices that are debated and debatable or, worse, dangerous. The philosopher Hannah Arendt thought that we should be conservative towards it, so as to allow newcomers to an already old world to innovate there in their turn.
If we adopt this wise perspective, we will always want, first and foremost, to do no harm. Neither psychological nor physical. Primum non nocere.
Now imagine a complex, controversial and highly divisive topic in society, among adults. For various reasons, we have to or want to talk about it at school, with children.
Red lights immediately come on.
Tools to do no harm
To act wisely, we will wish, wherever possible, to base ourselves on the best established knowledge.
We will also ask ourselves, very seriously, at what age we can talk about this delicate subject and what we can then say about it. Above all, we will be careful not to indoctrinate and not to do harm. We will put everything in place so that the teacher does not turn into an activist for a cause and the class into an ideological battlefield. We will do all of this and we will do more if what is taught could have serious consequences for children.
Right now, as you know, all questions relating to sex, gender and trans people are of this order.
By appealing to the most solidly established knowledge, we will learn that there is an immensely broad consensus among biologists telling us that sex is a biological reality, that it is binary and defined by the gametes. On this subject, we will view the rich material proposed by the biologist François Chapleau.
We will also learn that medical practices of transition and transition assistance applied to young people and commonly used for a long time are now questioned and banned there, for example in Norway, England and Finland.
One will read with horror the story of the recently closed Tavistock gender identity clinic in London, where unqualified people were prescribing hormones or puberty blockers to children, an inexplicably growing number of whom too often did not benefit from it.
We will read the Cass report on these questions, the product of years of work by a serious and competent team. In particular, it concluded that there was only “remarkably weak evidence” for the use of puberty blockers and hormonal treatments for children with gender disorders.
Without a doubt, we will have to talk to adults about all this and respect everyone and everyone’s rights. But what to do at school with the children?
My but…
Sex, we want to teach from primary school, is, according to this program, a “social category which divides the population between women and men based on physiological characteristics”. I have another definition, his biology teacher will no doubt tell the student…
In the high school curriculum, we are told about “sex assigned at birth”. Really ? Many rather say that we see it. And even before birth.
Marie-Claude Girard, for her intervention before the committee of wise people on the subject, took the time to consult resources and tools that are suggested to people working with early childhood and primary and secondary students on sex and gender. She found disturbing assertions presented as scientific, but which nevertheless sparked debate. We question the binary of sex and we affirm the existence of a third sex (intersex or other); we deny the biological reality of women (who become cisgender) by asserting that this word is not linked to the anatomy of the person. And other assertions as well.
Red lights must come on. Of course, we do not yet know how all this will translate into the concrete incarnations of this program, in the classroom, nor how teachers and other stakeholders will deal with all these questions. But be careful.
And everyone, parents, scientists, doctors and the general public, must pay close attention to what is going to happen. Primum non nocere. Children first.