Click to play videoNew Delhi: Whether or not to talk about sex seems to be the biggest academic worry in schools across country’s four states.
After HRD Ministry’s ambitious National Adolescent Education Programme (NAEP) ran into trouble in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, the Government was forced to tone down the content of the course manual.
Even the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) steered clear of using “explicit” words in the teachers’ manual of sex education to ward off potential objection from any quarters.
While topics like arousal, masturbation, ejaculation, intercourse and teenage pregnancy have been deleted from the teacher’s manual, diagrams and posters that describe the passage from puberty to adulthood - and were the cause of uproar - have also been done away with.
But the programme, currently being field-tested in 7,000 schools across the country, isn't all about sex.
As CNN-IBN found out, it also deals with topics as diverse as drug abuse and facial hair.
While strong reactions from teachers, especially in Punjab and UP, may have prompted the Board to water down the handbook, the revised version has been designed to ensure that the entire programme is not scrapped.
It's, of course, a totally different matter that most teenagers are pretty up-to-date as far as sexual terminology goes and the “distasteful” diagrams are no more explicit than the ones in their biology textbooks.
So, does such government censorship make sense in the age of Internet, mass media, child sex abuse and AIDS?
More importantly, is sex education meaningless without the use of explicit words? This was the big debate on CNN-IBN show Face the Nation conducted by Sagarika Ghose.
On the panel to debate the issue were Committee Member, National Adolescent Education Programme and Consultant Psychiatrist, VIMHANS, Dr Jitendra Nagpal,
Janaki Rajan, Professor, Jamia Milia Islamia and former BJP MP, B P Singhal.
Words that are wrong
For the NCERT Central Board for Secondary Education words like arousal, intercourse and teenage pregnancies are wrong. The words have been dropped from the adolescence education manual for fear that some might find them objectionable.
The BJP is constantly saying that sex education will lead create an immoral society, will lead to single parenthood, and other moral problems. But what is the problem with those, which are only descriptive words?
“The problem is at what age are these words given to children,” said Singhal.
When told that in an age of Internet and mass media, a child can get them online, Singhal remarked, “A 10-year-old can also learn to make a bomb on the Internet. But that doesn’t mean we teach him to do that.”
He felt the best way of imparting sex education is from a mother to a daughter and from a father to a son.
But Janaki Rajan held an opposing view and said there was a strong politics of sexuality.
“One of the major ways in which traditional societies control behaviour of the young is by taboos. This is just a continuation of that mind set,” she observed.
Source of sex education
In a particularly sexually aware environment as ours, should children not be learning about sex education from a sensible source rather than a television and pornographic websites?
“How do you guarantee that the teacher is going to be a sensible source?” Singhal asked.
Rajan said it wasn’t as if young people were suddenly becoming sexually aware. In India the average marriage age used to be 16 years so they just learnt by experience.
“Why don’t we find HIV/AIDS pejorative? I have to go into the whole range of sexual practise if somebody asks me what it is,” Rajan pointed out.
But Singhal said you don’t need to have condoms while telling a child about HIV/AIDS.
“You have to tell them it’s communicated through sexual contact and it’s for parents to tell them about safe sex,” he added.
When asked what his objection to a teacher talking about sex is, Singhal said, “The objectionable part about the course is the fact that volunteers should be picked up (one boy, one girl) so that they can feel the genitals of each other.”
But Rajan informed that the proposal has been withdrawn.
Are we imitating the West in blindly pushing sex education?
“The important point is the manuals that have come out take away the sensitivity. We have also forgotten that when we talk about sexuality, there is a question of relationships and feelings involved,” Rajan said.
She also observed that something as elemental as sex education should not be pushed by the AIDS campaign because in that way we put the “most horrible thing, which is AIDS to something that is so completely beautiful and natural - sex.”
So does that mean that those against sex education are making a medical and educational question into a moral question?
Jitendra Nagpal agreed with Rajan and said words like arousal and intercourse have nothing to do with embarrassment and every child will come across them, not just in the manuals and text books, but also on the Internet.
“In a democracy sensitivities and sensibilities across the country should be respected,” Nagpal said.
Difference between titillative sex and educational sex
“The only problem I have is when and how should children be told about sex,” said Singhal.
Singhal, in relation to sex education, had earlier observed that hamari maryada khatam ho jayeegi (our cultural values will end). But why should maryada depend on sex education?
“I think there’s a certain relationship between a teacher and a student. There is a wall,” said Singhal.
But Rajan quoted the outgoing President APJ Abdul Kalam who said, civilisations and societies need to periodically renew themselves, and if they don’t do that, they become irrelevant.
“We need to understand that a majority of the people in this country are young. We are also signatories to the child rights convention – which says the child has right to information and education – and we must honour that by telling children about facts,” Rajan said.
She added that what has been missing while evolving the modules is that we first needed to understand the children.
Stick to sankriti and shun sex education?
Should sex education then be made into a question of maryada and Bhartiya sanskriti or about communicating with facts certain issues that face children today?
“The whole objective of any programme meant to develop children should be based on creating awareness, responsibility and empowerment. The current National Adolescent Educational Programme is not lecture based and invasive,” said Nagpal.
When asked why doesn’t he want to renew our culture and remain frozen in what is his definition of Bhartiya sanskriti, Singhal said, “There is a certain absolute element in every human being which never changes – the soul. Every value connected with that element will remain same for eternity. Therefore don’t talk about changing of those values.”
He added that he wasn’t against sex education on the whole, but objected to boys and girls being taught in the same class.
But Rajan differed and said they must be taught together because when you are husband and wife, you live together, men and women work together.
“You have to learn to understand people in an equal platform where a woman has as much rights as a man has. There are many in my generation who believe that women have no sexuality because they were never taught it. Because it wasn’t done to talk about it,” Rajan said.
However the panel agreed that parental consent is essential in this matter.
“There should be an inter-disciplinary team which should understand what is it that we are trying to communicate,” said Rajan as she wrapped up the discussion.
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