Address to the Belmont School Committee

February 1991

Before making a presentation to the Belmont Public School Committee, I begged the Archdiocese of Boston for help. I asked for the presence of Belmont’s local parish priests, a member of the Archdioscean Education Department, and a reporter from the Catholic newspaper, The Pilot. No help was rendered; however, The Pilot did print some of the excerpts from the address in an article entitled, “Town Sex-Ed Curriculum Challenged by Belmont Parent.”

February 1991 Address to Belmont School Committee
Belmont, Massachusetts

Re: Sex Education in the Middle School

by Alice A. Grayson – Archdioscean

I. A. The age in which our children live is radically different from the one in which we grew up. Sixty percent of marriages currently end in divorce. The media, movies, and children’s music preach violence, drugs, and sexual abuse. Recall the recent court case of suicide allegedly caused by music. Consider that the heroes in all our movies, from Top Gun to 007 — all sleep with the heroine. Marriage isn’t even mentioned! Our culture teaches own all you can; use whomever you wish; do whatever you want. Children are conditioned to love things and use people, rather than the other way around.

B. Parents feel alone in such a culture. They have traditionally looked to the school for backup on values, such as honesty and integrity; discipline and order; kindness and respect. The schools have increasingly taken on more responsibilities with our children — from driver’s education in the ’60s to day care in the 90s. Isn’t sexuality education a 1990s extension of that principle?

II. A deeper reflection is really in order — I think we all agree that a proper understanding of sexuality is important for everyone, because how a young person handles his sexuality has a significant affect on his future and we all want successful marriages for our young people who chose to marry. But it is also true that we as parents differ significantly on what we want to teach, when we want to teach it, and most certainly on how we wish to teach. In fact, with regard to graded public school sex-ed classes, William J. Bennett, in 1987, reported that “70% of high school seniors had taken courses in sex education… yet when we look at what is happening in the sexual lives of American students, we can only conclude that it is doubtful that much of sex education is doing any good at all.”

III. Look at the question on how we differ on what we think the children should know —

A. The state’s advertising campaign on condom promotion is based on the philosophy that the unmarried — sooner or later are going to become sexually active with multiple partners before marriage. Many sincere parents and teachers believe kids nowadays are at risk during these “growing up” years and the only solution is to avoid AIDS and pregnancy with the use of condoms and other contraceptives until they mature and achieve some wisdom to pick a spouse. These parents want a course that will teach their children to use condoms to avoid AIDS and pregnancy.

B. Then there are the gay liberationists among us who see the schools as an excellent place to promote and protect gay rights — insisting in the name of respect — that homosexuality is simply one acceptable and totally moral life style. The traditional, legal definition of the family — as “a group of people related by blood or marriage” has to go. Gay liberationists are found as both teachers and parents. These parents want a course that will teach their children that gays and lesbians have normal, healthy and fully acceptable relationships.

C. Some parents are feminists. Essential to feminists philosophy is a notion that women have been oppressed and not recognized for their accomplishments (other than child rearing) by a male dominated world. Necessary to recognition is, of course, the precedent that women have to be free to do something to be recognized for, and so, reproductive freedom — absolute right to abortion and contraception is the foundation stone. These parents want a course that enforces feminist beliefs. What education helps form a successful marriage — takes on a very different component meaning — depending if you are representing the state, or homosexuals, or feminists…or of course, if you are a traditional Roman Catholic.

D. For me, a Catholic, a happy marriage reflects a philosophy and purpose of sex education probably best defined by Pope Paul VI — in 1970 — when he spoke to couples — on the “Spirituality of Marriage.” He writes:

“Parents need to foster an education to help the child and adolescent, without inhibiting or repressing them:
1. Become gradually aware of the power of developing drives awakening within them;
2. Make these drives an integral part of their developing personality;
3. Control the increasing strength of these drives;
4. So as to achieve and feel affective and sexual maturity to Prepare for the Gift of Self;
5. Through a love that will give to that gift its true dimension in an exclusive and definitive manner.”
I underline the concepts of role modeling — and the warnings of inhibition and repression contained in the gradual understanding of the gift of self.

Pope John Paul II mirrors Pope Paul VI. He expounds:“Education in the first place, is the duty of the family, which is the school of richest humanity. It is, in fact, the best environment to accomplish the obligation of securing a gradual education in sexual life. The family has an affective dignity which is suited to making acceptable without trauma the most delicate realities and to integrating them harmoniously in a balanced and rich personality. (#48, Education Guidance and Human Love)

For me — sex cannot be considered without an understanding of sacrament — virtue and grace; sin and forgiveness; prayer and consecrated celibacy; and total, unconditional, gift of self. Organ recital of Latin terms steals the poetry from sex; explicit pictures risks trauma to a child not ready; knowledge militates against the private individual discovery of the person, gradually — from dating, to courtship, to marriage.

IV. The public school can only teach reproduction; my child, and I suspect the children of many parents, should only learn procreation (i.e. collaboration with God in sacramental marriage, bringing forth a new human being destined to live forever in heaven). Reproduction/procreation is a clear church/state conflict.

V. The intrinsic evil or sex education is that it makes public and open what is private and sacred. Within the human person there is a private secret realm — guarded by modesty — which must not be entered without purification and permission. It is a recognition of something which belongs to God — “Thine— as God commands” — not mine to do with as I wish — it calls for reverence, and should be not taught by strangers, as if a subject of academic pursuit.

VI. From the above disclosure, you can begin to see why I just didn’t send a note to school asking to excuse Tim.

A. All of the parents — because of their different ideas are being cheated, because the above-mentioned platforms are mutually exclusive. The teacher is the curriculum! There is no effective control over what the teacher values or discusses, or what questions the children will raise, together with the responsibility on the teachers’ part to respond to such unknown questions. Worse yet, in Belmont the curriculum calls for values clarification which means children discover “their own truths. This philosophy completely undermines all parents’ wishes for their children and plunges into a moral relativism which says that “conscience creates the truth,” whereas we know that conscience’s proper role is to discover the truth that already is.

B. Furthermore — the curriculum calls for “confidentiality of classroom discussion.” Parent communication is encouraged, but the confidentially clauses seriously inhibit what comes home. Your private lives become the subject of classroom discussion.

C. We all know children mature at different times, and if the timing is wrong, explicit sexual information can invade the latency period of the child causing fixation and trauma. (Latency is a childhood psychological term describing a time of sexual dormancy, where a child’s energies must be directed to cognitive learning, affective development, and moral discipline.) This desensitizing affect also pulls away the veil of modesty surrounding the inner person. Beyond that, desensitizing and values clarification combined, develop in the child an unnecessary arousal of curiosity — leading to hands on experience, given the tools of experimentation shown in class. What is given lip service to avoid, is really being encouraged to try. The real damage of premarital sex is that it causes a bonding to take place between couples. They become “blind” to real problems which should be addressed while dating. Bad marriage choices, and psychologically immature young people then enter marriage, unprepared, and eventually end their marriage in divorce.

D. I request that this School Committee rethink the issue of sex education, not only because we all differ on the content of such a course, but because the methodology leads to the conclusion no parents want — divorce.

E. Lastly, I believe it should be noted that parents aren’t dopes. We feed our kids; we clothe them. Wouldn’t it be necessary to prove that we neglect them in these areas of sexual morality, in order for the professional teachers to say anything? Our very role modeling is our best defense that we do indeed teach. F. Should the schools back us parents? Yes! But only in the most generic terms of commonly agreed standards — such as integrity, honesty, self-discipline, and self sacrifice.

VII. In closing, I would like to quote the former President of San Francisco State College and U.S. Senator, Samuel I. Hayakawa, who addressed the U.S. Senate in 1978 on the issue of invasion of privacy brought about by the new trend in education. He warns:

“An educational heresy has flourished, a heresy that rejects the idea of education as the acquisition of knowledge and skills…The heresy of which I speak regards the fundamental task in education as therapy.”

As a parent, I need to know if the Belmont School system is about therapy or education. If the answer is education, then let’s drop sex therapy from the curriculum. We must never forget that human sexuality contains within it the mystery of marital love but it also contains the potential for the mystery of iniquity.

Respectfully submitted,
Alice A. Grayson