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September 17, 2006
Backtalk
Necessity or taboo?
THIS is with reference to Rabail Qadeer Baig’s article “Necessity or taboo?” (September 10, 2006). I agree with the writer that there are misconceptions about sex education. In a typical Pakistani classroom, the discussion of sex education is considered sinful. As educators, we should realise its importance. Providing sex education can help in avoiding physical, mental, moral and psychological complexities. There is a lack of proper health educators in schools. I suggest teacher training institutions should develop manuals for the training of teachers in health education.
Shahid Hussain Mughal
Iqra University, Karachi
RABAIL Qadeer Baig, quotes an author who says that the inability to provide sex education “is one reason why developing countries have high rates of abuse, out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies and abortion.” If this is true, then why is it that countries such as the UK and USA — long committed to “sex education” — have high rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancies (over 50 per cent of all UK births, according to a recent survey), not to mention spiraling paedophilia convictions and other social breakdowns? In the US, some states have even experimented with abstention education owing to the failure of sex education. The Minnesota-based Search Institute emphasises the need for clear behavioural boundaries to be drawn out for young people; they need to know what activities are “in bounds” and “out of bounds”. Young Americans have been getting rather mixed messages in their environment: the very education aimed at discouraging inappropriate intimacy among them is producing the opposite result. All this underscores our need to assess information and data on both sides, rather than simply photocopying social prescriptions from dominant cultures. We need to ask whether turning “sex” into just another word and breaking the inhibiting social taboos is really going to solve our problems or will it make things worse. Perhaps it is time we engaged in original thinking rather than blindly apply solutions from dominant education models here.
A.H.
London
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