Critical Response Activity
The article, “Revealed: The sex-education update Ontario badly needs: Cohn,” is written for the Toronto Sun by Martin Regg Cohn. The main idea of this article is that the sex-education system is being changed and people will need to accept it and see how beneficial it is. Cohn used a more casual approach, making the article seem like more of a blog post. He used strong arguments and did a good job of making the reader agree with his opinion. The main idea in the text is reasonable because children and future society will benefit from this new curriculum, preventing emotional/physical damage and the spread of STIs. The author’s argumentation methods help the reader to feel comfortable while they’re reading the article rather than feeling attacked. The article helps to make the reader feel more informed on the topic, and not as though an opinion was being forced at them.

The tool for evaluating ideas that will be used is the stakeholders’ perspectives. The intended audience of this text is parents, or adults who are planning to become parents. This is because it’s very informational about what will be discussed for different grades and even includes prompts of what teachers might say to the children (such as for a grade seven class they might say in a conversation, “Engaging in sexual activities like oral sex, vaginal intercourse, and anal intercourse means that you can be infected with an STI.”). The article also talks about how a parent guide to the curriculum will be released, which is more directed to parents than anyone else. The people who should be care abut the ideas raised in this text should be parents, people who will be having children in the near future, teachers, and the government. Parents should care because their children will be the ones receiving this new education system. Teachers should care because they’ll be teaching new material and it’ll change the atmosphere of the rooms by having the children more knowledgeable in this subject. The government should care because it’ll cost them money to print the new books, and it will help people to have less sex related health issues in the future. Children will also be affected by a new sex-education system because they’ll be more knowledgeable in sex-education, which can help to prevent things like unwanted pregnancy and the spread of STIs.

The criteria for evaluating argumentation that will be used is evidence. The author uses quotes and statistics to support his argument. Some of his quotes include the teacher prompts from the sex-education books (such as, “In a prompt for Grade 5 students, here’s a suggested response for teachers: “Sharing private sexual photos or posting sexual comments online is unacceptable and also illegal.””), and from the official opposition (such as, “as leadership candidate Monte McNaughton argues, while boasting of his credentials as the father of an 18-month-old — parents should “be at the table.””) . The statistic he used was public opinion polls show more than 9 in 10 parents are broadly supportive [of the new sex-education system]. Most of the evidence is relevant to the topic because it all relates to the argument that it’s a good thing we’ll be having a new sex-education system. It’s all supporting the idea that parents need to accept the new system, because it’ll be more beneficial to their children. The evidence is thorough because it gives examples for parents to see what their children will be learning, and nothing is completely unrelated. When the article talks about the opposition it’s focused on how the new sex-education will be more beneficial to children than if we elected the official opposition and had it stay the same as before. The evidence is well incorporated into the argument as the argument is mostly quotes and content from the book, and when it talks about the official opposition it is only talking