Sex Education Should Start With Adults

30.04.2010 | By: A. B.

Our children get little or no sex education. And whose fault is that?

Sex education is an integral part of the process of growing up. (PhotoXpress)

When adults know less than their children

The book Love and Sex quotes a part of a very interesting public discussion on sex. A young man shared his opinion with the crowd, saying: "If anyone should be educated, it is the adults. It seems this is exactly what keeps them from happiness." It was a seemingly innocent and perhaps even amusing sentence, with a much deeper meaning. It points at one of the main failures of sex education. Those, who are supposed to educate and impart knowledge often know less and are much more reserved than the youth, they are supposed to educate. The majority of those responsible for sex education still only include the biology of reproduction in it. And this is exactly the wrong kind of perspective on the human sexuality, about which we should be told much more than that it is almost like birds, bees and, for example, bovines. In these modern times, things really have taken a turn for the better, as discovered by a recent study performed on primary and secondary school teachers with mostly anonymous questionnaires. But just a couple of years ago, sex education was all but ignored or taught by inadequately prepared teachers. Biology of reproduction could be taught even in lower grades of primary school, because children are often very receptive for these things even then, and they often get a very twisted view of sexuality and everything connected with it. Even though sex education and everything connected with it is partly present in higher grades of primary school, it does not encompass all the important segments but only on small pieces of an otherwise very complex mosaic.

Sex education is a broad term

In real sex education classes, there would be talk of masturbation, homosexuality, physiology, sexual reactions, contraception, and, for example, about differences in male and female sexuality. Sexuality would have to be mentioned in many other related topics as well, like when talking about family, love, society and the problems of the modern world, and of course when speaking about the problematic issues and moral questions in sex deviations and abortion. Sex education should be, as they claim in the book Love and Sex, organized in the same way as other subjects, so harder concepts would follow easy ones, parallel to age and education level of the individual. But people responsible for sex education in primary schools rarely look upon these things in such a broad way. If they tried implementing this approach, they would ned quite a few teachers, who are actually happy with their own sexuality, satisfied and happy teachers, who could educate without reservations and objectively. Or, as the aforementioned youth hinted, sex education should start with properly educating adults.

A big part of the responsibility lies with the parents

We have to realize, that everyone in contact with children actually performs sex education, especially the parents. Sex education is not only answering the child's curious questions but also leading by example, which can range from their reaction to a naked woman in a newspaper to their response to a dirty joke. Sex education is not only about childbirth, menstruation and wet dreams, and that is why it is so important. Even though some parents might want to try and exclude it from their child's daily life or even look down on it, they will just pass their perception of it to their child, which means that they will very negatively affect their child's future sex life.