Govt's lesson: Talk sex, but mind your language

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.