The author has ignored the issue that parents were concerned about; forbidding students from allowing their parents/carers from knowing of the curriculum. Nice to see you ignore that.

Yes, Petal - if there was any justice in the world, such a thing would happen. Of course, there is and it does.

Mind you, in the case of Cheney it still hasn't prevented him continuing in his position as one of the world's greatest tools.

Back to the topic - the level of homophobia evident in some of the above comments only reinforces the justification of the inclusion of such essay topics in school curricula. Clearly some kids are getting very bigoted views at home - not just about homosexuality, but about human diversity in general.

The son of a friend of mine was beaten on the head, and ended up in hospital, because some yong thugs thought he was gay. (He isn't.) One of my students went out to collect a pizza and was beaten up severely, again by people who thought he was gay. That is what is properly called homophobia. It is still distressingly common.

I recall a group of police drowning a homosexual man in the Torrens river.

And there are other risks of leaving homophobia alone--to those who engage in it. A group of schoolboys lured a gay man to a Sydney park and kicied him to death. They were convicted of murder, and sent to jail.

It done not matter for this purpose what you think about the morality of homosexual sex (though the arguments are quite clear that there is nothing wrong with it). What matters is that violent attacks are immoral, whoever they are made on. And there are parts of our society where they are encouraged. We should protect the potential victims, and we should also act to dicourage young people from acting in ways that will lead to their conviction and imprisonment.

There is reason also to discourage those who pick on minorities, spreading hate about them. If today it is a race, or Muslims, or unionists, or lawyers, tomorrow it may be Catholics (as it has been of course) or Protestants, or Jews, or left handers, or politicians. Creating prejudices and supporting them encourages people to accept new ones, by inuring them to the faults in the bad arguments that support them.

Firstly, the subject matter was inappropriate for the student at her age and stage of psychosocial development. It is not the sort of problem that should be set for a 13 year old - the development of early and middle adolescents is all over the place.

In terms of her psychosocial development the child was almost certainly in early adolescence. So she was basically working on hormones and it is, especially for girls, a time of intense embarrassment. She would have been into romantic fantasies. Her thought processes and general lack of maturity would stand in the way of gaining any positive results from the assignment.

Secondly, the teacher insisted on secrecy and the assignment was to be concealed from the student's parents. This betrays ethical problems in the curriculum and classroom teaching. It would have confused the student and placed her in a most awkward position.

Maybe if the assignment were set for a class well into their middle adolescence, or later. It is a silly task though.

From the comments on this site, it strikes me that the homosexual community is getting the cart before the horse; schools are obliged to put the wellbeing of the students first and that is not assisted by hitting them with concepts before they can handle them.
Schools are not there to drive social change.

Finally, what about the ethics of requiring students to conceal things from their parents? That really is crooked thinking at a time when so much hinges on developing trust between parent and teen.

The authors claim that others have not complained about the assignment. There is an obvious reason for that - secrecy was one of the pre-set constraints.

But one could also ask how the suthors know there were no other complaints because from this example, there doesn't seem to be much feedback to parents anyhow.

Leigh, sexual organs were not designed at all. Even if they had been, nothing at all would follow about the morality of using them.

You might as well say, 'the fact remains that fingers were not designed for typing on computer keyboards'. It's a silly argument, and you ought to drop it.

ozbib,

Your lack of logic does not assist the homosexual political agenda, it rather makes you appear totally irrational.

The human body is rational engineering, designed to perform all activities our purpose and creativity imagines. It is clear design that males have a penis and females a vagina it is not an accident of evolution with no design or purpose. There are clearly complementary design feature in the sexual organs even in basic species deliberatly designed for attraction and procreation of one of the single units of the species.

The attractive passions of males and females exist purely for the bringing together of the complementary sexes to fulfil the survival of the species. Human emotions express desire for the complementary sex partner, designed for lifelong comfort and procreation. Only the union of complementary genes creates offspring of the same species as an individual having one single sex organ fulfilling one gender role.

That some single same sex persons have emotional attraction to each other rather reflects a disfunction in their designed sexual identity, as most males are very capable of procreation. The disfunction is emotional and not physical design.