Sex Education in Philippine Schools

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With school year 2010-2011 opening this week (next week for others), there’s been a lot of buzz about the inclusion of sex education in high school and elementary curriculum. The Secretary of Education has announced that Adolescent Reproductive Health will be piloted in some 150 schools across the country. Just as expected, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines issued a statement against this move. They contend that sex education should be left to the parents.

Personally, I’m all for RH in the education system. After all, the teachers won’t be teaching about sex itself but:

Rather than sex alone, Valisno stressed that the modules for sex education will be focused on adolescent reproductive health, rising teenage pregnancies, responsible parenthood, gender equality and sustainable environment. (as quoted from here)

I’m trying to recall if we had anything close to RH when I was in high school… I think my Health teacher in the all-girl Catholic high school I went to talked to us about getting to know your body as a very important step towards learning about reproductive health. I believe it was part of the curriculum. But there definitely wasn’t any talk of sex. I mean, no one would dare teach teenage girls about sex, even if it wasn’t a Catholic school, people would just be so scandalized! Hehe.

I guess my point is that there is nothing wrong about RH in schools. I don’t believe that raising consciousness pushes kids to engage in sex. Of course, the content and methods of teaching has to be carefully prepared. One thing that might help Valisno gain more support for this, is to stop calling it sex education in the first place. It’s not like they’d be teaching kids on how to do it, right? They won’t be promoting Viagra or Extenze, would they?

Educating young people on how to be responsible with their bodies and, eventually, with their sex lives, is a step towards building an educated citizenry. It also wouldn’t harm the efforts to control population growth.

Of course, simply teaching RH won’t guarantee that young people will stop making mistakes. It won’t guarantee that they’d abstain from premarital sex, or that there will no longer be teenage pregnancies. It also wouldn’t stop them from growing up to become adults who will get married and then later have a dozen kids that they can’t feed. Teaching RH in schools won’t be enough. But we have got to start somewhere.