Considering The Ministry of Education’s New “School Sex Education Standards”
By Kim-Hong Mi-ri
Published: May 14, 2015
Translated by Marilyn Hook
Editor’s note:
Controversy has erupted as the Ministry of Education has released new “School
Sex Education Standards” (SSES) that direct educators not to give information
about homosexuality. In response, the ministry has conveyed to each Education
Office that it [the ministry] teaches about homosexuality from a human rights
perspective, but does not include mention of it in the SSES because it’s not a
general concern in terms of sexual activities. In this article, feminist
activist Kim-Hong Mi-ri discusses the SSES.
You have to speak, even if your words have no weight
“Do you think that person has the time to read something
like an Ilda column? No matter how much time you spend writing it, you are a
powerless small-scale outlet and that person (Hwang Woo-yeo) is a political
bigwig who has an influence on all of society. He’s not the kind of person to
do something because you said to, your words don’t have that kind of power.
They’re just empty echoes.” (Commenter name: rudf****, April 14, 2014)
The above is a comment left on my
last article, which was about the “employee marital status checklist”
hanging in the offices of Education Minister Hwang Woo-yeo.
Why did this person decide to write the helpful advice that
“they’re just empty echoes”? As luck would have it, the day I saw this comment
is the day that the clause mandating CCTV in daycare centers passed at a
general meeting of the National Assembly. I had written an article
arguing that, far from ensuring children’s safety, CCTV would cultivate
distrust in society. Being upset already about this development, I couldn’t
help but think, “What is the point of
writing these impotent articles?” after reading this comment.
Despite this, the Ministry of Education’s “School Sex
Education Standards” have brought me back to the computer. The SSES, which
insist on a single standard, formalize discrimination based on sexual
orientation, limitation of the right to form a family, and even limitation of
adolescents’ right of self-decision, all under the pretext of teaching about
sexuality. Since this sets the clock back twenty years, it appears I will need
to say what I have to, even if it’s a powerless and empty echo.
The SSES are narrow-minded and divisive
The SSES show clearly and concretely what the Ministry of
Education considers to be “standard.”
The standard to them is narrow-minded and even divisive. For
example, the SSES are supposed to respect individual differences, and allow for
autonomous choice among diverse values instead of unilaterally inculcating the
teacher’s sexual values. Yet giving information about homosexuality is not
allowed.
This means that, in their “standard,” homosexuality is not
included in the category of diverse sexual values. They thus make it clear that
the terms “homosexuality” and “sexual orientation” are not to be used in sex
education, and require that content related to LGBTQ issues be taught in a way
that separates the human rights and sexual values aspects. In their “standard,”
the paradoxical position ‘LGBTQ human rights are important, but don’t talk
about them’ is not strange at all.
Though they may reemphasize that these teaching plans make
it so sex ed doesn’t merely convey the sexual values of the teacher, the
teaching plans contain only the sexual values that the ministry thinks are
right. They adopt sexual equality values and erase the existence of anyone who
is not one of the two genders (man or woman).
They push for heterosexual unions and erase the existence of other types
of unions. They permit family based on marriage and exclude the many other
types of family. Teachers are encouraged to refrain from helping children to
understand one-person families and families composed of people who are not
married.
They have very thoroughly limited sex to
sex-for-reproduction. Other types of sex are described simply as dangerous or
contaminated. Adolescents, who don’t have the time, money, or social support to
propagate the species anyway, are targets of persuasion and control by adults.
They erase the fact that teenagers are sexual beings and demand from them abstinence
within the reproductive sexuality that adults permit.
The lesson plans of the so-called “standard” that is the
SSES flatter themselves that they are neutral. Even as they erase the
experiences of adolescents, people who are outside of the sexual binary, people
who don’t love the opposite sex, and people who don’t want to have children or
don’t get married, the lesson plans contrive to call themselves “neutral.”
Philosophers have long questioned whether neutrality is
possible. In particular, feminism has asked how it has been possible to
steadily sustain “objectivity” throughout a history in which women have been
excluded. They discovered that objectivity is only achieved when the voices of
a cumbersome group are discounted. The voices of those who can’t speak, or who
go unheard or are rejected even if they speak, are dismissed as subjective or
non-neutral.
Feminism calls this kind of objectivity “weak objectivity,”
as it is secured through discrimination and erasure and calls itself
“value-neutral.” I think that when a subject insists that he is neutral without
considering his particular historically-constituted position, the objectivity
that comes from a place in which experiences that don’t fit that standard are
gotten rid of and only certain experiences remain is one that has already been
severely damaged.
The Ministry of Education’s sex education standards are a
prime example of damaging objectivity while claiming to secure it and adopting
a biased perspective while calling oneself neutral. This is why I cannot agree
with their use of the proper noun “standards.”
Why this retrogressive measure?
 |
| A School without Homophobic Harassment: UNESCO Guidebook for a Safe School for Everyone (2013.10) © Korean National Commission for UNESCO |
These are some of the contents of the SSES: sexual equality,
the reason why abstinence is necessary, advisable (heterosexual) dating
conduct, preparation to become a parent, marriage and choosing a spouse, and
the danger of pornography.
Some might look at this list and not see a problem with it.
If they have a similar position on sexual issues as the ministry does, they
might do that. However, to people who don’t agree that there are only two
sexes, who support teenagers’ pleasurable sexuality, who love or can love those
not of the opposite sex, who don’t tie sex to marriage, or who believe that
sexual pleasure is not a danger but a possible source of energy, this kind of
list is frustrating, narrow-minded, and old-fashioned.
More than anything, I’ve come to reconsider the goals and
meaning of sex education. Is inculcating unilateral, narrow-minded views on sex
like this what Korean society needs now?
Just as sexuality cannot be limited to sex, the reason for
sex education is not just to promote safe marriage and the propagation of the
species. Sex education is necessary to help students realize how certain
interests and powers affect sexuality, how to understand and make sense of
sexuality, and how to deal with related issues. I mean that its sole goal
should not be for a binary-conforming heterosexual couple to abstain until they
turn [Korean age] 20 and then get married, have children, and live
problem-free.
Instead, the goal of sex education is to make it possible
for students to ask why their partner must be of the opposite sex, how to
determine whom they love, why it’s difficult to be allowed to have sex before
the age of twenty, and then why this “marriage” - which everybody whose done it
advises against - is so encouraged, why the order of marriage and childbirth is
fixed, and why other orientations and practices are held in contempt.
It’s also a process of learning what causes the contempt and
hate surrounding sex, why it might be associated with feelings of
embarrassment, depression, and sometimes dirtiness, what the cause of anxiety
about it is, and what it is about sex that causes emotional reactions and
attempts to control it.
On April 21st, the Youth Sexual Rights Group
asked through a petition whether the SSES “doesn’t set rearing sexless and
heterosexual citizens as the goal of education?” If that is the goal, the SSES is a very
well-made measure indeed.
But the Ministry of Education needs to go back one year.
When the first draft of the SSES was proposed at that time, the ministry
included in the teaching materials new awareness of diverse sexual
orientations, the rights and interests of LGBTQ people, and discussion of a
variety of types of families. It didn’t shut sexuality up in the closet, or
divide it into “normal” and “unusual” according to an arbitrary standard. It
didn’t enforce control and silence in the name of neutrality. So what happened
in the past year?
The problem that caused the Ministry of Education’s sex
education proposal to regress 20 years over the span of a year is yet again the
deficient understanding of sexuality of Minister Hwang Woo-yeo, who took office
in August of last year. To Minister Hwang, who so strongly emphasizes the
importance of marriage that he hung a poster with the marital status of
ministry employees in the ministry offices, school sex education cannot but be
a process of preparing students for marriage.
Activist Na-yeong of the Network for Global Activism told me
that Minister Hwang was a co-representative of the August 2013 “Korean
Religious Council on Special Measures for Homosexuality and Homosexual Marriage
in Textbooks” run primarily by Protestant churches. The head of this group
that, according to issue 437 of Human
Rights Oreum, released an urgent statement saying, “Textbooks and the Seoul
Students Rights Ordinance, which encourage homosexuality, something that most
of the nation’s citizens consider abnormal, must be amended immediately,”
became the head of the Ministry of Education
After he was appointed minister, it was natural (though this
cannot and should not be natural) that South Korea’s School Sex Education
Standards came to approve of hate and discrimination and became training for
heterosexual married life.
Action: the power not to allow hate and discrimination
At this point it seems that I will have to agree with the
netizen who tried to disempower my writing. It is true that Minister Hwang is a
political bigwig who has an influence on all of society. In less than a year,
he has mangled Korea’s sex education and made the future of LGBTQ youth even
more dark and uncertain. He has put us in a crisis in which children are to be
taught not that sex is pleasurable and enjoyable but that it is something that
must be controlled and is dangerously dichotomous. If he continues in this
direction, the discomforting and troubling views people have on those who are
not married will only increase.
Hwang Woo-yeong is really something. (Bravely embracing the
netizen’s comment that there’s no way that he will see this article anyway, I
omit the respectful title. This is the trivial resistance of a “powerless”
reporter who is deeply upset that he holds such a powerful position.)
So what is to be done? Should we wait and see what happens
with these “standards” that don’t deserve the name? Should we, even as we see
the continuing, systematic, and concrete homophobic actions taken by certain
forces, say that we are mere
eggs and they are firm rocks*? Should I listen to the
bystanders who say that my efforts are only empty echoes and walk into the trap
of powerlessness?
In the film The Attorney, [the
character] Jin-woo says, “Rocks are lifeless but eggs are living things, so
eggs overcome rocks in the end.” These are moving and inspiring words, but I,
as someone caught in this era in which a feeling of powerlessness is common,
dismissed them as a cool bit of dialogue. A few days ago, however, I saw how a
tree near the stone Buddha statue in Taean had pierced a crack in the rock and
grown tall, and I began to want to grab hold of the power of life.
Korea’s political depravity continues on, day by day,
without an end in sight. The SSES mark another such day. This era in which
resistance is ignored grows longer. Countless eggs are being broken, but I feel
that what they are hitting is not just the ignorance and hatred of those with
power, but my despair and feeling of powerlessness that march in step with
them.
I don’t want to end this article with an exhortation to
hope, which can only sound childish. But there is no other way to express that
which only living and moving things can make. Poet Park No-hae said that winter
is full of the promise of spring, and when we feel despair, hope has already
arrived. As long as the person next to me and I are moving, it doesn’t matter
whether it is winter, whether there is darkness and despair. Because I know
that I have found people who will give me strength when I falter and that we
are already working together and finding the way.
* This is a reference
to the Korean idiom “like hitting a rock with an egg,” which is used to
describe an action which has no hope of success.
*Original article:
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