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"Parental opt-out" tying Alberta's education system in knots
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Half-baked human rights ideas can lead to full-blown chaos
April 8, 2009
By Dan Shapiro
The Alberta government has floated a trial balloon about giving parents a legal right to pull their kids from school lessons they find religiously problematic. We should pop this balloon before it floats off into the realm of unintended legal consequences and administrative chaos.
This is no time to further complicate the mandate of the Human Rights Commission (HRC) which is aimed at discrimination in employment, rental accommodation and goods and services “customarily available to the public.” The job of the HRC was badly confused by a 1996 amendment forcing the Commission to adjudicate disputes about statements “likely to expose a person or a class of persons to hatred or contempt.” The Minister responsible for the HRC, Lindsay Blackett, agrees with our recommendation to do away with the 1996 amendments and focus the HRC on its core mandate. So why is the government now thinking of adding another excessively broad and vague provision, this time about education?
Do we really want the HRC policing Alberta’s classrooms? And if, as suggested, the Commission is not to administer the parental opt-out, why add it to the HRC legislation in the first place? If the parental opt-out belongs anywhere, it should appear in education legislation. But parents already have the right to opt their children out of sex education. So why add this provision to human rights legislation?
Some claim that the parental opt-out is a compromise for finally adding the words “sexual orientation” to Alberta’s human rights statute. But given the 1998 Supreme Court decision that “read-in” sexual orientation to the legislation, it’s time to add those words and do the right thing for the right reasons – without trade-offs.
The proposed parental opt-out could create administrative chaos in the HRC and in the schools. The proposal assumes that teachers have absolute control over when controversial matters arise and can forewarn parents about “objectionable” topics. But real classrooms are not like this. Many discussions are stimulated by current events, such as recent reports that Sweden became the fifth European country to legalize gay marriage. When a student raises this in a current affairs discussion, should the teacher refuse to discuss it, or even to clarify what the news story is about? How the opt-out will work in practice is entirely unclear. This is asking for trouble.
If the opt-out is legislated, could parents file human rights complaints against teachers, principals, school boards, or the Minister of Education when they felt their opt-out had not been respected? Moreover, given the potential difficulty of administering the opt-out, it could be very costly, not just unwieldy; shouldn’t those dollars go to funding schools instead?
And how are we to determine what counts as a legitimate religious objection? All kinds of things could provoke a parental objection on religious grounds, and children’s education could suffer. The motivating factor for the opt-out seems to be concern about homosexuality and gay marriage. But, according to the Alberta Teachers Association, there is nothing in the curriculum about gay marriage, and parents can already opt their children out of sex ed.
Biology and the science of evolution are likely to attract religious objections. But evolution is not the only area that could trigger such objections. What about discussions of dinosaurs or other phenomena whose existence in the past is incompatible with a strict Creationist view of natural history?
The teaching of other sciences such as astronomy could also be impacted. Does the earth revolve around the sun or is it the other way around? What about mathematics? Religious objections held up the development of mathematics for hundreds of years. Jewish or Muslim parents could object to Middle Eastern history on the grounds that discussion of one group’s claim to a religious homeland violates the other’s religious views. And the list goes on.
People are entitled to believe what they believe by way of religious conviction. But adding a legally enforceable parental opt-out to human rights legislation is opening up a gigantic can of worms. The proposed opt-out should not be bundled with the long overdue and well-studied reforms needed to protect freedom of speech, to add “sexual orientation” to Alberta’s human rights legislation and to improve the processes of the HRC to ensure transparency and fairness. Ethical leadership on this issue demands, at a minimum, much more careful consideration of the proposed opt-out and an opportunity for full consultation with the public.
Dan Shapiro is a research associate with the Calgary-based Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership.
Published in the Flin Flon Reminder, April 13, Edmonton Journal, Apr. 17, Grande Cache Mountaineer, Apr. 30, 2009.
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