Too young to love
As a teacher and parent, while I appreciate the willingness of Frs Gleeson and Hamilton (Eureka Street, March 2004) to address thorny issues in Australian education, I suggest respectfully that the views of both writers are a little Panglossian.
The recent ‘SHine SA’ (sic) sex education program, (anything but lustrous!), introduced for ‘trial’ in some state schools, is self purportedly ‘values neutral’, an ideological stance proudly espoused by many of its 1970s-bound proponents. This program contains an undiscerned Petronian array of activities and attitudes that assume the very relativism and subjectivism rightly repudiated in Fr Gleeson’s citing of Max Charlesworth and is at odds with his own firm affirmation of objective moral values.
Moreover, Fr Hamilton would know that adolescents, despite appearances to the contrary, seek—indeed, often demand—the setting of clear, strong limits. As an experienced Indian Jesuit educator often remarked: ‘Even in the Garden of Eden, there was an angel with a flaming sword’, and as Dante recognised: ‘The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing’.
There is a very real parental and pedagogical time and place for a ‘humble language’ of ‘prohibition’. Conversation, of course, should not end there, but a Spockian denial of a role for various, apt forms of nay-saying would deprive ‘ordinary people’, especially parents and teachers, of a necessary means of relating to the young in their care. It would also paint an unhelpfully roseate picture of adolescents, and worse, expect of our young a self-direction and ‘wisdom’ beyond most of them, especially in what might aptly be regarded as a hyper-sexualised and commercialised culture.
John Kelly
Tranmere, SA
Hidden casualties
In ‘Encountering the Homeless’ (Eureka Street, March 2004), your correspondent neatly highlights the service delivery and policy challenges of this difficult area.
The proffered solution, however, to urge government to adopt more innovative policies, is short on content and excludes any personal encounter. It is precisely the nature of homelessness that makes political responses so difficult. Such suggestions are in danger of returning discussion of homelessness to a purely economic forum, to simply equate it with a lack of housing fixable by strategies such as rent assistance.
There are some positive policy approaches such as the formation of Housing Associations enabling capital to be directed into housing for people on low incomes. Such initiatives are a long awaited response to the continuing decline in public housing. Proposals to change Centrelink’s rules for identifying people also have