EA – First Post
What is your motivation for choosing the political issue and range of engagements?
As part of the Global Politics course, I get the opportunity to actively engage in political issues that I’m passionate about. A lot of my family live in Ireland and as I am also hoping to go to university in Ireland, I really wanted to do find out more about some of the important political and social issues prevalent there.
After the recent success of the Repeal the Eighth campaign, a pro-choice movement which helped make abortion legal in Ireland, I was interested in the shift in society toward more liberal values. When exploring this it became clear that the growth of more progressive, left-wing ideas have been facilitated by the movement away from the Catholic church as well the increasing political awareness of this generation. This change is perhaps due to the increasingly important concept of globalisation; the growing interaction and interconnectedness has increased travel as well as being catalysed by the importance of social media and supracultural communication.
When looking at different case studies that represented this issue I found a party called Solidarity who have been involved in a bill to reform sexual education in schools. This need to change the curriculum to a more inclusive, non-denominational programme represents the change in cultural values in society. I think the changes to sexual education is an interesting issue for me as I have been schooled in multiple countries and the curriculums have been very different in order to represent the cultural and religious values in society. For example, when I lived in a Muslim country there was no sexual education whereas there was a more progressive curriculum when I lived in Europe and then I moved to another country where LGBT rights aren’t respected and the legalities of LGBT+ relations aren’t discussed in the course.
More inclusive sexual education curriculums which discuss different sexualities and different religious perspectives have been controversial in other countries as well, the teaching of LGBT perspectives in a primary school in Birmingham lead to parents protesting and stopping their children from going to classes. This is clearly a current and important issue for many people; exploring the different perspectives and the role of the government in dictating school curriculum will be a very interesting area of politics to engage in over the summer.