Sixteen Volts

I don't know if the kids here in Ontario have sex ed in their schools and how comprehensive it is. Probably not, especially in the Catholic school system. But considering that CityTV plays movies that show boobies, perhaps the moral climate here is not quite as puritanical as in USA. In Finland things tend to be more European and sex ed is the norm starting from the fifth grade or so, although it is not quite as hilarious subject as it is depicted in Hollywood. One exception, though: I can still remember the group presentation projects in high school sex ed classes, especially the presentation about sexual perversions that was given by the boys who sit at the back of the class. (The high school sex ed teacher, the well-liked and popular phys ed coach, also explicitly recommended daily masturbation for all of us as a healthy way of sexual expression, but that's perhaps topic for another posting.)

Sex ed aside, I'm pretty sure that the local kids here don't have religion classes like we had, at least not in the public school system. If you are like 95% of the other Finnish kids who belong to the official state church, religious teaching is a compulsory subject. In the elementary school, the basic features of Christianity and Christian life are presented in an age-appropriate manner, and some heavily sanitized Bible stories are pretty much presented as fact. And yes, this includes the Creation story and the Flood. This is not a big deal, since these are just little kids and it's the religion class. I never heard one peep about these topics in history, geography or biology classes where sanity prevails.

One interesting cultural difference here is that in Finland these days, the official state church of Lutheranism is for all practical purposes a seriously leftist organization, as is evident from the social and other policies that it advocates. The word "tolerance" sure seems to be used a lot. The Church also organizes religious education summer camps for teens who are of 15 years of age or so, as is their traditional way to create good Christian citizen that dates back several centuries. Most teens actually happily go there, since these days such camps have a reputation of being somewhat like the Band Camp in the American Pie movies. Many a hymnal there has been found to contain a condom! First time away from home and parents in a summer camp setting is the time for experimentation with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Some world-weary pastor aided by a bunch of happy Ned Flanders -type 18-year-olds ("hey, let's all sit in a circle, play guitar and sing kumbaya") don't really have much power to stop the hormones, I guess.

(Myself, I never went to a camp but participated in a more traditional day school -type instruction. The instructors, a man and a woman who were both some kind of church workers, were pretty good and solid people and I have no complaints about it. I also remember the male instructor actually explicitly teaching that the Creation Story should be taken as an allegory, Adam being the first man in the human evolutionary chain to reach certain level of brain activity, self-awareness and the sense of right and wrong. This interpretation also handily solves the nagging problems such as where Cain's wife came from.)

In the junior high, church history and other such more advanced topics come in, and in high school, you get to learn some comparative religion presented in a neutral fashion, pretty much as if somebody took the most important parts of the Wikipedia page "List of Religions" and turned it into a high school course. Speaking of which, when I followed the links and read the pages for two hours or so, I think I learned more there than I learned during the whole high school religion classes. If I had a time machine, I would go back and give my younger self a painful spanking for being so damn inefficient.

I would actually claim that such religion classes are a net positive thing to have in school. Religion is a pretty big and important topic in how the world works, and educated people are supposed to understand the field in general and recognize the various cultural references that are based on religion and religious works. (Pop quiz: where does the camp-gothy expression "children of the night" originally come from?)

Until high school, every single religion teacher I had was a woman. This is not that surprising, since women are less reality-based and more emotional than men and hence tend to be more religious. (Men preach from the pulpits for historical reasons, but it's women who fill the benches, as anyone can see by visiting a service.) Some of these women were quite religious nutjobs, so all atheists reading this should note that the religion classes are actually a very efficient way to decrease general devotion in religion in students. Few things make anything lose its appeal as quickly as having the state force-feed it to people in as boring manner as possible. Although I do remember one teacher who had really great tits, making the boring subject that way much more palatable! Of course she was also a nutjob, but actually not in a bad manner. In fact, even as a teen atheist I found her brand of nutjobbery to be somewhat endearing. (Or maybe it was the tits.)

There is also possibility for some serious comedy here. For example, I remember the teacher in junior high who, in all apparent seriousness, explained that taking mind-altering drugs makes the person see directly into Hell. The same teacher also once made the mistake of playing a tape that explained how rock music is satanic, produced by some Pentecostal outfit. The tape was such a total hoot in a manner that I later learned to associate with Jack Chick tracts that pretty much every single week after that our class asked if we could hear the tape again, eventually making the teacher rather weary of the whole topic.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, January 24, 2006 at 7:51 AM