Sir, - I feel moved to comment on Andy Pollak's article "School for Sex" (Weekend, October 17th). Clearly, he is broadly in favour of the Department of Education's Relationships, Sexuality and Education programme (RSE) and the liberal view which "seeks to leave behind the old Catholic virtues of modesty and chastity and create a new sense of self in Irish young people which is independent, confident and expressive ... mak[ing] up their own minds about what is good and bad, right and wrong ... understanding and fulfilling their desires, through knowing their pleasures and, appropriately, indulging in them."
A few points must be made in relation to this simple liberal or laissez faire faith. Firstly, in such programmes, there is an assumption that sexuality can be controlled in a reasonable way, just as drug taking and alcohol consumption are also felt to be a matter of rational choice. Our post-modern society is the first ever to remove all taboos against sexuality. Quite a move! Quite a risk?
Secondly, what poses as good and positive is perhaps like surfing the huge, unstoppable, porno-entertainment sex industry specifically focused at teenagers, who, far from being free and independent, are made into slavish consumers who move in fear of not being sexy enough. This blows open the normal reticence and modesty that is essential to forming relationships. Leaving teenagers "free" in this respect "to choose their own behaviours" according to their "human rights" is a capitulation to what in former times was called adolescent rebellion and what in those times was challenged and encountered by adults who felt the need to care and protect these teenagers in their charge against their own excesses.
Thirdly, in the most progressive thinking, the notion of (parental) care and protection has almost gone in favour of the fatal illusion of children's autonomy together with state protection, which parallels - and this might be the hidden liberal agenda - a desire for more parental freedom from children and child rearing. Now, everyone is encouraged to pursue their own autonomy! However, this sexual freedom is dressed up and generally advocated by the media as positive, as fun, as open, as safe sex, the children are the casualties of this break-up or break-down. Programmes like RSE are not so much driven by the ideological left, as the Catholic right and left themselves would like us to believe, but much more by the ineluctably fragmenting effects of global media capitalism which we can only hope to try and keep up with. This is little more than a kind of damage limitation.
However, the remnants of this leftist thinking remains in Pollak's article, as he quotes Tom Inglis lamenting "the difficulties older teachers in general, and priests and nuns in particular, will have in helping their pupils become fully mature, sexually active, pleasure seeking, morally responsible adults if they have never been that way themselves" (my italics). This ideology continues in the same vein as its distinguished predecessors by radically discrediting the old and idealising the young. - Yours, etc., Rob Weatherill,
Crosthwaite Park East,
Dun Laoghaire,
Co. Dublin.