A common complaint about education in Britain is that everything begins too early: 4-year-olds start school shortly after abandoning afternoon naps; toddlers barely able to hold a pen are supposed to form letters. Yet one subject, some say, is left too late. Sex education first appears on the compulsory curriculum when pupils between 11 and 14 years old learn the basics in science class; relationships, sexually transmitted diseases and the inadvisability of conceiving in one’s teens are relegated to the optional “personal, social and health education.” Primary schools need only have a policy on sex education–and for some that policy is “we don’t teach it.”
Backed by sexual-health and children’s charities, a cross-party group of MPs is trying to change all that. In an open letter to the government, published in the Daily Telegraph on August 26, they call for all sex education, not just the mechanics, to be made compulsory, and to start much earlier. That, they say, could help to cut the number of British teenagers who become pregnant: at 40 per thousand girls under 18 each year, Britain’s rate is outstripped in the developed world only by America’s.
Not everyone, though, is keen on teaching near-babies how babies are made. Primary-school teachers would feel “vulnerable and uncomfortable” if asked to cover such a sensitive subject, says one teaching union. It would “seriously undermine parents,” who are the proper source of such information, says the Family Education Trust, a traditionally minded charity. Worse, there are doubts that more, or earlier, sex education would, in fact, work as billed. An overview of the evidence on the relationship between extra sex education and teenage pregnancy, published in the British Medical Journal in 2002 and hotly contested ever since, found the more meticulous the research, the less likely it was to find any effect at all.
Discussion Starters
1.) What is an appropriate age to begin sex education?
2.) Who should be responsible for teaching youth about sex?
3.) Based on your own experience, what would be the ideal time and environment in which to teach children the facts about sex?
4.) Do terms such as “birds and bees” help or hurt having an accurate, balanced and fair understanding about sex?
