Dr. Aidan Seery:

I am conscious that the experience in TCD provides us with a small knowledge base and I admit that I have no experience of schools or schooling. From the experience of young adults in college, however, and particularly with reference to this debate about the factual or objective on one side of the spectrum, and the ideologically tendentious on the other end because that is probably a more appropriate way to look at that end of the spectrum, the students we have dealt with come from different backgrounds. A total of 25% of them come from international backgrounds and while many have had a religion-based education but every one of them comes into a consent workshop with a set of attitudes, dispositions and world views. Every one of them has experienced social power relations in their own bodies and they have been formed and shaped by their experiences whether religious, non-religious or whatever.

Stepping precariously into the realm of schooling and teachers, without any background, a set of highly skilled professionals who are able to engage with this theme on the basis of dispositions, attitudes and power relations somewhere in the middle of that spectrum between the impossibility of looking at this theme purely factually and objectively on the one hand and with a highly ideological tendentiousness on the other, is required. It will require great skill and careful planning, and a careful curriculum.