Porn, Pythagoras and Poetry – What Should Schools Teach?

Our Director Mark has written this blog:

At PTE we keep a list of calls from others for schools to teach something, and last year the most common call was to do with sex and relationship education. Within that, as recently as last month there have been a few people saying that schools should do more about porn during lesson time.

This raises several thought-provoking questions around how we should teach porn and sex. Direct instruction, or discovery learning? Academic GCSE or vocational BTEC? Do we start with American Pie and work our way up from there? And what role is there in all of this for group work?

Silly jokes aside, there are serious questions that we as a society need to answer surrounding what schools should be offering their pupils, and what is beyond their remit, and sex & relationship education is at the heart of many of them.

I am not saying it should not be taught in schools, nor that porn shouldn’t be a part of it. But what I do want to impress on people is that there is an opportunity cost to what schools can teach. We all know that most schools and the people in them are already at their limit of what they can do; we cannot allow schools to be a dumping ground for society’s problems.

Whilst, as an advocate for knowledge-led curricula, I believe that children should be taught the best of what has been thought and said, I continue to wrestle with what this should be extended to. Schools are meant to be places of academic learning – institutions that give children a grounding in ‘secondary’ knowledge (the periodic table, the Renaissance), building on the ‘primary’ knowledge (how to walk, how to talk) that children should pick up in day to day life.

One of the key pillars of knowledge-led learning is ensuring that disadvantaged children who would be less likely to receive secondary knowledge get it from schools, putting them on the same level as their peers who may receive some of it anyway through things like museum trips. But does teaching about something like pornography sit in this group? I’m sure we all agree that the mechanics should be part of any serious Biology curriculum – but where is the line drawn?

We know that talks about ‘the birds and the bees’ can be squirm-inducing for everyone involved. I’ve got four daughters of my own, and we’re pretty open at home, but it’s not exactly something my wife and I revel in doing. But we are clear that it’s our responsibility to bring up empowered young women who understand rights, responsibilities, consent, enjoyment, pitfalls and so on – not their schools’. That said, both being teachers, we also know that many parents are only too happy to leave the bulk of the job to a combination of schools and a strong parental controls filter on their computer.

This is not intended to talk down parents at all. The vast, vast majority do a great job for their children, often in very tough circumstances. It’s a hard role at the best of times. But schools, like parents, have limited time and resources, so at some point we have to ask whether we can shift these responsibilities towards families rather than schools. Perhaps the ideal situation is for parents to deal with these issues, and schools just reinforcing things later? Would that let too many slip through the cracks though? It’s really hard to say.

I’m not looking to give an answer to these questions; I just think there should be more debate about them. Schools can only do so much well, and each time something is suggested to be added to the curriculum, those making the suggestion need to be able to articulate what would come out to make room for it. We need to have an inclusive, sector-wide conversation about where we draw the line for what’s on schools and what’s on parents. If we’re going to do the right thing by children and their families, and improve things for our teachers and others, then something has to change; we need to be explicit about who’s teaching what – be it porn, Pythagoras, or poetry.