Some local students aren’t happy with being taught 20-year-old material, so they’re doing something about it.
Megan Kingston and some of her classmates at Parry Sound Sound High School are holding a walkout today. It’s part of a province-wide protest by students over the Progressive Conservative government’s decision to repeal the former Liberal government’s 2015 updates to the Health and Physical Education curriculum, reverting Ontario schools to the 1998 version.
The biggest controversy with that decision stems from the sexual education component of it. Critics say the 1998 version is out of date and doesn’t address things like consent or modern issues like online bullying, sexting, same-sex marriage and gender identity; things the 2015 updates were meant to deal with.
The 15-year-old Kingston says she was inspired to take part in the protest because the elements left out of the 1998 curriculum are crucial for people her age to learn. “They’re leaving out things like consent, and LGBTQ and cyberbullying and other stuff like that.”
Kingston says learning about those things gets even more important as the years go on, “I’m more thinking about kids in the near future that are going to learn this information. This is a new generation of kids that we’re talking about, so I feel like they shouldn’t learn what other adults learned in 1998.”
Kingston says this issue is a very big deal to her and her classmates. “We talk about it a lot. We’re all really passionate about how the health education has changed, so we’re putting a lot of effort into this protest.”
The message Kingston wants the public to get from the protest is that Premier Doug Ford “going back to how it was isn’t great”, and that learning the new things in the 2015 curriculum is important to the current generation.
She’s expecting between 50 and 100 students to join the walkout. Students have been encouraged to wear purple shirts as a symbol of solidarity. The Parry Sound High School walkout is happening from 1:00pm to 3:00pm. They’ll be gathering at the school’s track.