Going to a Catholic Positive Puberty meeting tonight

I'm going to a school meeting tonight on sex education Positive Puberty for Year 7 & 8 pupils.

I'm not particularly impressed with the list of items I've been given that they will be studying, and even less impressed that this list was read out to the class before I was even given the option to withdraw my child. The list included, "Coping with wet dreams, periods and erections." Apparently the bishops have approved the content of the programme.

So this post is in effect my notes for tonight.

SEX EDUCATION AND CATHOLIC SCHOOLS ~ EWTN
chapter XI of On Teaching the Faith, by Thomas P. Dolan, 1984.

Bishops who countenance sex education in schools quite probably tell themselves that if the instruction is given under Catholic auspices, it will be given "the right way." But there is no right way to give explicit sex instruction to children who are mentally and emotionally unready for it. There is no right way to give information in groups that should be given privately. There is no right way for an outsider to assume a role which belongs particularly to the parents.

...

Modesty and reticence are guardians of chastity. When these are broken down, through casual discussion in groups of what should be intimate, personal matters, the child loses his strongest defense against unchastity.

When bishops have countenanced sex education in schools, it is clear that they intended an education based on morality, and aimed at forming, in the young, the virtues of modesty and chastity. In the Basic Teachings, the bishops said: "In a sex saturated society, the follower of Christ must be different. For the Christian, there can be no premarital sex, fornication, adultery, or other acts of impurity or scandal to others. He must remain chaste, repelling lustful desires and temptations, self-abuse, pornography, and indecent entertainment of every description... The follower of Christ must be pure in words and actions even in the midst of corruption."

These things should be taught to young people in every Catholic school. But what we have in many schools is something altogether different. We have courses which reflect the obsession with sex that has permeated secular society.

Does this sex education have as it's aim a cultivation of chastity?

Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II ... stipulat[es] that “especially in the heart of their own families, young people should be aptly and seasonably instructed about the dignity, duty, and expression of married love. Trained thus in the cultivation of chastity, they will be able at a suitable age to enter a marriage of their own after an honorable courtship” (emphasis added). Thus, if there is anything than can rightly be called “Catholic sex education,” it cannot be anything else but an “education in chastity” imparted by the parents or in close collaboration with and in support of the parents.

Sex Education: The Vatican's Guidelines