The Senate passed HB 1107 with respect to certain education matters by a vote of 29 to 17. It came over from the House as a bill about ensuring “cultural competency” in teachers. The Senate added requirements that high school health classes include information about fetal development.
The anti-choice/pro-life people have my sensibilities on a hair trigger whenever I see “fetal” anything in legislation, but I don’t find anything objectionable in the proposed requirement — other than my general dislike for the General Assembly getting into the weeds of dictating particular school curricula.
The instruction must include:
(1) the result of human sperm and egg convergence;
(2) the resulting development of human conception;
(3) photographic images portraying each state of uterine fetal development; and
(4) descriptions of human fetal development.
I guess the pictures are supposed to make girls feel too guilty to get an abortion, but it looks like they’re allowing schools to teach pretty straight forward science here, so it seems more or less kosher to me.
The cultural competency basically requires the Department of Education to prepare standards in training teachers to “successfully teach in a manner that serves the diverse needs of all students.” “The standards must provide for multicultural courses and culturally responsive methods that assist individuals in developing cultural competency.” Seems like a big, vague task chock full of jargon.
Incidentally:
“Cultural competency” means a system of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that enables teachers to work effectively in cross-cultural situations. The term includes the use of knowledge concerning individuals and groups to develop specific standards, policies, practices, and attitudes to be used in appropriate cultural settings to increase students’ educational performance.
When I used to attend committee hearings for the legislature, I noticed a huge difference between the testimony of hard science types and engineers versus social science types and teachers. The engineers would stand up, tell you the facts as they understood them, and sit down. The teachers and social scientists would stand up, spend 10 minutes telling you about their credentials, mention a few facts, and then throw out some jargon that ostensibly had something to do with the facts they had just mentioned. I never could quite tell what information was simply beyond my range of knowledge due to the complexity of the subject and what was simply bullshit. To some degree, I suspect that was the point.
We saw pictures of stages of fetal development in high school biology class. I’m pretty sure we saw similar pictures of dog or other mammal development which looked quite similar, in the context of learning about evolution.
I’m hoping the state of health and sex education isn’t such that we’re having to tell high school students that the union of sperm and egg can cause a baby.
I think more education about health matters is a good thing. Hopefully part of the discussion will be something like, “…and if you don’t want these stages of development happening inside your body this year, abstain from sex, or if you are going to have sex use a condom or other birth control method.” And then offer detailed information about the available methods.
Come to think of it, shouldn’t we tell our kids that babies come from storks laying eggs in cabbage patches or some such? I mean telling them about sperm and eggs are going to lead to tricky questions about how the sperm gets into proximity with the egg.
It’s by kissing….right?!? Or is it slow dancing…Or maybe it’s holding hands…wait, maybe Britney and Jamie Lynn can tell us;-)