The Impossibility of Sex Education: A Psychosocial Study of Parent Involvement in Policy Controversies

In recent years, many impassioned debates regarding educational policy have pitted parents against the public education system and have thrown questions of parental and state responsibility for childrens education into the media spotlight, particularly in relation to issues of sexuality. This dissertation investigates the emotional aspects of these debates by taking an approach to educational policy research that is informed by psychoanalytic theory. Working across the three fields of psychosocial, critical policy, and sexuality studies in education, I highlight the ways that the participation of parents as policy actors in two Canadian educational policy debates is influenced by their own histories of development, education, and sexuality. The first policy controversy I focus on took place in Alberta in 2012, when the government tried to pass a new Education Act that included a provision stating that educational programs of study needed to be in alignment with existing human rights legislation. The second policy controversy took place in Ontario between 2015 and 2019, when a new Health and Physical Education curriculum was introduced and then withdrawn from the provinces schools. Employing a psychosocial methodology, I analyze print and online media coverage of both controversies alongside in-depth interviews with two parents who participated in the Alberta policy case and three parents who participated in the Ontario case. My analysis of the significance of emotional dynamics throughout the data proposes that parents use defence mechanisms such as splitting to contend with the ethical and affective complexities of discharging their responsibilities of care to their children while having to share educational authority with the government. The emotional intensity circulating through these two controversies suggests the difficulty of confronting the failures and limitations inherent in projects of parenting, governance, and education.