Children’s Right to Sexual Education Despite Religious Concerns Raised by Parents: A Case Study of the 2015 Ontario “sex-ed” Curriculum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A critical case approach is taken to address religious opposition to recent changes in curriculum regarding sex education in Ontario public schools. This includes consideration of the influence of the Christian "purity movement" that is popularized in some parts of North American culture. In a recent Ontario study of parents of elementary and secondary students, 95% of parents agreed that some level of sexual health education should be provided in schools. A separate 2016 poll showed that 82% of parents self-identifying with "no religion" supported the revisions, as did 61% of Catholic parents, 55% of Protestant parents, and 20% of Pentecostal Christians. One in six Ontario parents considered pulling their children from public school over the new sex-ed curriculum, in favour of homeschooling their children or placing them in private Catholic schools. Of the parents who did remove their children from sex education, the majority did so for religious reasons. And yet, evidence suggests that depriving children of sexual health information as a result of the religious identity of a child’s family is a form of unlawful discrimination that may result in physical, sexual, and/or psychological harm to the child. This paper submits that the option for parents to be able to remove their children from sex-education lessons in schools due to a conflict with their religious and cultural values violates children’s human rights in accordance with international law as per the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".