Education Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the transgender-inculcated person
by Archbishop Cranmer:
‘Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man’ is a Jesuit maxim attributed to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus. He probably never said it, or if he did, he almost certainly said: ‘Give me the boy for the first seven years and I will show you the man’. The quote is also attributed to Aristotle, but in a sense the source doesn’t matter, for by its attribution to both one of the greatest spiritual minds and one of the greatest philosophical thinkers ever to have existed, it moves beyond cultural constructivism to transcendent truth: the workings of the mind were designed to be subject to time and space.
And into that time and space comes children’s education, by which process their moral, cultural and religious values are inculcated and their politics are moulded – from the history lesson which scorns the ethics of empire to the singing of ‘I vow to thee my country’ in the daily act of collective worship, schools are places where political perspectives become truths and religious exposure becomes morality. There is, of course, much debate concerning the proper aims of education and the right balance (should such a thing exist) between the prescriptive statutes of governments and the freedoms of parents and particular religious groups, but in a liberal democracy there must be the means to impart the knowledge of citizenship which is deemed necessary to sustain that liberal democracy, or the state ceases generation-by-generation to be either liberal or democratic.
Relationship and Sex Education (formerly Sex and Relationship Education) is one of those subjects which straddles the government-parent-religion tensions of responsibility and provision. For some, it is the task of parents to teach sexual morality and reify good relationship; for others, it is the joint responsibility of parents and religious communities, with a civic minimum imparting the essential facts of biology and social reality. For others still, mindful of parental delinquency and religious prejudice in this regard, it is fundamentally a function of the state to ensure that all children are taught the knowledge and life skills they will need to develop healthy relationships and stay safe while having sex.
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