Um, I always though the whole point of school was to expose to you to views beyond that of your parents. Some families can be great incubators of wisdom and commonsense, many others can’t. Remember, 100% of all incest (something that nearly all people agree is ethically and morally wrong) happens within families.

Very good point Edward@3.

Especially since some of the biggest ethical challenges many people will face in their lives revolve around sex and relationships and around personal and financial interactions in the illegal but often peer approved world of drug use – both of which usually manifest themselves first during high school years.

At the very least, it would provide ethics classes with case studies the students can really relate to.

“You have a mad crush on Kayleen but she will only sleep with you if you give her an eccie at Chris’ party this Saturday. The only money you have to score with before then is earmarked for your baby sister’s birthday present. Also you are a hormone charged 16 year old boy who’d fuck anything up to and including mud if you had the chance. Discuss.”

If sex and drug education were merely taken as topics for ethical discussion (as per the post), it is difficult to see why this should be prohibited. Maybe open and frank discussion would produce ‘good outcomes’ to a greater extent than than didactic “dos and don’ts” information sessions. (And one assumes that what constitutes ‘good’, and whether we should think merely in terms of ‘outcomes’, would also be part of such a discussion rather than being closed-off by predetermined views.)

The students showed great capacity to think both critically and laterally when offered the opportunity but the whole thing fell over when the grant ran out and there was no coordinator.

Round about the same time or earlier there was a move inside the NSW Dept Ed to develop a “value free” ethics syllabus, the idea being to have discussion of ethical issues with no particular point of view being used to lead the way. I was consulted informally on that in my capacity as a Humanist committee member and amateur philosopher. I don’t know where it ended up.

Nowadays I have reservations about schools taking on things like sex and drug education which really belong to the responsibilities of parents. Evaluation of the outcomes of school drug education is equivocal at best.

2. Giving parents of ‘non-scripture kids’ the option of sending their young’ns along to ‘ethics discussion groups’ – and assuming the discussions are good – might compel the people running the traditional scripture classes to lift their game to the same level. If the latter fail to do so, it might result in some parents of ‘scripture kids’ pushing their little rays of sunshine into the rival ethics classes. Market forces and all that.