So basically we read a short story in English class about a girl being kissed without consent and wrote a essay on the importance of consent and why it was totally okay for the girls to stop the boys from kissing her. I think it amazing that we are being taught about such important things like consent and not doing anything you don’t want to. The short story was Grace by Darcie Little Badger.
If you really want to do something nice and unexpected, write a letter to the principal and the superintendent saying how much you really like what that teacher does. Almost never do students do that and it’s something that would probably get noticed and be a nice gesture that goes back to the teacher. Rarely do teachers ever get thanked for what they do until years later…
Happy to read that you feel that it is important to understand consent and respect the dignity of other people. Bravo to the author, the teacher and the class.
That’s awesome! When people say teachers don’t teach life skills, they really try to through their content!
Do you know if any other classes did this? I ask to see if this was curriculum or your teacher. I am guessing it was the teacher. In that case, be sure to tell them how much this meant to you. They went on a limb to teach something valuable. Thank you is what keeps a lot of teachers trying.
That’s awesome. I am a middle school substitute teacher and noticed a lot of physical touching in a violent way. I took time to remind every single person that consent and body autonomy were important. ‘No’ is a complete sentence.
Generally, I would say that the purpose of school is to convey knowledge, not to tell people what to do (which would probably not work, anyway). However, having a class that teaches students some basics about law might not be a bad idea, and if we have such a class, it should include the definitions of sexual assault and rape and the fact that they are crimes.
I think consent for physical touch is something we should teach from an early age. There may be some culturally informed exceptions such as handshakes and hugging. However, even hugging is drifting into the ‘needs consent’ category in recent years.
However, I think consent itself is not enough to guarantee the ultimate goal, which is mutual enjoyment. Even if you obtain what you think is consent, the desire for contact might not be entirely mutual. The difficult thing to teach about consent is that you never truly know if you have it.
UK already has this. It was part of our ‘PDP’ programme where we were taught things like drug safety, how to write a CV, STD symptoms and sex education. We had consent education as part of that- I’m pretty sure every British kid remembers being shown the ‘consent is like tea’ video and discussing different scenarios and deciding if they were rape or not.
I’m quite shocked that your country doesn’t, it just seems like common sense.