RODNEY HIDE - The Wrong Journey: Erica Stanford’s Sex Education Failure

I have been impressed by just how disgusted parents are by what our Minister of Education Erica Stanford has the schools teaching our kids about sex. It’s easy to see why the radicals pushing this material don’t want parents to know what is being taught.

The Ministry’s official Year 9 resource, *Navigating the Journey: Relationships and Sexuality Education*, produced by Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa, is a glossy 196-page document. It is not a balanced, cautious guide to growing up. It is heavily weighted toward exploring “gender identity,” “sexual orientation,” “diversity,” and critical discussions around pornography and sexting. Students are encouraged to view gender as largely self-defined and to explore “diverse attitudes and values about sex.”

The underlying message is clear: everything is up to the individual. Whatever you want, so long as you get consent, take precautions, get regular check-ups, and here’s how you get an abortion if needed. It is even suggested that age should be no real barrier because the police will rarely prosecute. Marriage gets one mention — only to explain that rape can occur within it.

Even the most open-minded and liberal parents sense that something is not quite right here. They might not view sex as especially sacred, but deep down they understand that it has a purpose. It is written into human nature: sex is for bonding a man and a woman together in a stable relationship and for producing and raising children. That purpose gives sex its meaning, beauty, and seriousness.

Yet for the authors of "Navigating the Journey", that very purpose seems to be treated as the downside — something to be worked around with consent forms and medical procedures rather than embraced as the natural telos of human sexuality.

This is the inevitable result of abandoning any shared understanding of human purpose. As Alasdair MacIntyre explained in *After Virtue*, once societies reject the idea that human life has natural ends and directions, morality collapses into pure emotivism — “I feel this is right for me.” That thin, subjective framework is exactly what is being taught to our children at the most vulnerable and formative stage of their development.

We are telling 13-year-olds that their bodies have no inherent direction, that biological sex is optional, and that the highest standard for sexual behaviour is mutual consent and personal pleasure. Then we act surprised when youth mental health collapses, identity confusion soars, and stable relationships become harder to form.

Minister Stanford needs to be asked these hard questions: Why is her ministry promoting resources that treat biological reality and the natural purpose of sex as outdated? Why are we allowing ideology to replace truth at such a young age? And why are we steering children into confusion and calling it education?

Our young people deserve far better. They deserve honesty about their bodies, clarity about human nature, and guidance toward genuine flourishing — not ideological experiments dressed up as “relationships education.”

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT leader