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Growing in Love 'harmful to children,' says Whitehead

The following are excerpts from a critique of Growing in Love by Margaret Whitehead that appeared in the Lent-Easter, 2003 edition of Voices magazine

In the year 2000, Harcourt Religion Publishers came out with Growing in Love (GIL), a program for Catholic grade schools (K-8) aiming to provide a "Catholic education in relationships."

Many of the "Catholic" things in the series appear, in fact, to have been included in order to be found in accordance with any possible Church "checklist" that might be employed.

Meanwhile, what is really intended to be imparted to children through this GIL series, what is effectively being taught through frequent emphasis and repetition is an almost wholly modem secular approach to the subject of sex.

After having carefully read through all of the materials, I believe the series would be, in fact, very harmful to Catholic children.

There are four main components to the Growing in Love program

1. A Student Activity Book for students in grades K-2; or a Student Textbook for students in grades 3-8.
2. A Teaching Guide.
3. A Family Resource book, containing extremely graphic materials and diagrams along with chapters that include various quota­tions from Church documents.
4. A Program Resource to assist the teacher or cat­echist that has the same extremely graphic information found in the Family Resource book.

Clearly the authors of Growing in Love have tried to anticipate every possible objection that has ever been made to sex education, and then provide an acceptable "Catholic" solution.

Unfortunately, however, the program is still based on the same exaggerated preoccupation with the physical and the psycho­logical and the this-worldly, at the expense of true moral and Catholic principles.

Church documents may be quoted and the pretense maintained that the parents are in control, but the authors have their own philosophy, which requires the parents to cooperate with the sex education experts strictly on the terms of the latter.

There are seven key Catholic themes that the GIL pro­gram claims are taught at each level.

But some key themes are missing-for example, the Fall (sin), for which mankind had to be redeemed by Christ.

As in a number of other modem catechetical and sex education series, the authors like to talk about God as Creator while having precious little to say about God as Redeemer.

The reason for this seems to be that, in the authors' typical glossing over of the reality and nature of sin, it is never exactly clear what we have to be redeemed from.

Remarkably, this nine-year program never mentions the Fall. It regularly downplays the seriousness of our need for a Savior; it also fuzzes over the authentic identity of the Savior.

Jesus is presented on almost every page as an example and a great model for us but is rarely presented to us as our Savior.

Throughout the program, our responsibility is consistently to others and to the "community," rather than to God.

There is an almost neo­Pelagian emphasis on "celebrating the goodness" of everyone and, especially, of celebrating a healthy sexuality.

Sin is mentioned, though sins are sometimes referred to as "risks" or "bad choices."

In the Grade 8 textbook and Teaching Guide, there is a reference to the "last judgment" but no mention of heaven or hell (in fact, hell and the devil are nowhere mentioned).

Probably no word or concept is used more in this program than the word "choice," except possibly "relationship."

Many of the uses of the term are perfectly all right, but there are at least two problems:

1) the term "choice," and some of the other sexual and self­esteem terms used, are, in the secular culture around us, connected to anti­Catholic and anti-supernatural agendas.

2) over-use of these terms supersedes the use of other words that would fit better with Catholic belief-namely, terms such as "obey," "doing God's will," learning humility," and so on. These terms are conspicuous by their absence.

The uncritical adoption by this program of fashionable contemporary ideas about male-female roles raises serious questions about how well the program's authors even grasp Catholic tradition and teaching concerning the respective natures of men and women.  .

[GIL promotes the myths that] the greatest public health problem in the nation today is HIV/AIDS-so much so that this problem, and the people who suffer from it, must be preferred over all others; and that the homosexual "lifestyle" is on a par with heterosexual relations and that anyone who disagrees with this is a "homo­phobe."

Throughout the GIL program, there is a strong emphasis on the care of HIV/AIDS victims (as if this were a primary concern of children in grade school-the concern taught should surely be for the care of all who are ill or victims!)

In a society that most people agree is already sex saturated and over-eroticized, it is surprising to come upon a sex education program claiming to be Catholic that is nevertheless immersed in the same kind of preoccupation with the erotic a pre­occupation that would seem to be far from healthy.

The authors of this program seem to want to initiate Catholic children into acceptance of the unhealthy eroticism of today's society at large.

Examples: Grade 4, Chapter 3, page 19: "At your age, your sexuality wisely includes having both boys and girls as friends.

"Understanding will help you respect others and their sexuality and learn to express your own sexuality appropriately."

One might legitiinately ask: what is an appropriate way of expressing one's sexuality in the fourth grade? And why are fourth- grade children being asked to dwell on ways to express their sexuality in the first place?

Grade 5, page 47: "To celebrate their special bond of love, hus­bands and wives have the gift of the intimate expression of their sexuality called sexual intercourse. . . The pleasure the spouses experience in sharing this special joining of their bodies is intended to deepen their love and unity and demonstrate their willingness to welcome children."

The children are being asked to focus on the "pleasure" of sexual intercourse in the fifth grade. What could possibly be "age appropriate" about this?

[GIL is also based on the myth that] exhaustive and graphic physical information must accompany moral formation-beginning in the early grades.

Giving out this type of information to pre-adolescents was never even imagined until about 40 years ago. Most people in most times and places have believed that a sense of privacy and modesty should prevail when dealing with sexual information.

The Church's official documents on the subject emphatically stress the same thing.

Maintaining privacy and modesty has never kept people from developing a sound sense of sexual morality; quite the contrary, this has served as a protection for sexual development and morality and personal privacy.

The virtual immersion in a kind of eroticism that is found in this program, however, is not likely to help in the development of proper moral formation.

Frank eroticization is quite pronounced in the supplementary materials. It starts in kindergarten and continues throughout the series, both in the student textbooks and in the supplementary books.

Two examples from the Family Resource Books:

Kindergarten Family Resource Book, pages 15-16: "Answering Your Child's Questions: What does having sex mean? . . When a man and a woman really love each other, they may get married.

"They then show their love and closeness by kissing, hugging, and holding each other in a special way. This special loving embrace is called sexual intercourse, or 'making love' ...

"Why do people need priva­cy sometimes? Sometimes your dad (or mom) and I need to be alone together so we can share our loving feeling in a special way. . ."

This is age appropriate for children in kindergarten?

Or again: Grade 7, Family Resource Book, page 15: "What is anal sex? What are 'sex toys'? What is 'S and M'?"

The answers to these questions in the GIL book are so explicit that I am not going to repeat them in this article.

The one exception to always being explicit and graphic that I found in the series was, by the way, when the discussion dealt with abortion.

There were no diagrams here, and the recommendation was: "If you must address the issue in a student-adult setting, use caution and avoid sensationalizing or dwelling on graphic detail" (Grade 4 PR, page 48). .

Why not employ some of the same caution in discussing graphic sexual details?

GIL remains a fundamentally flawed and harmful program.

It is harmful because it is ultimately based not solidly and organically on Catholic truth, but rather on a this-worldly philosophy and upon misconceptions that eclipse, vitiate and-in some cases-flatly contradict the Catholic elements that the authors have been at such pains to include.