Sex Education
A few days ago, someone in my Facebook network put up a link about the Malaysian government’s proposal on implementing sex education starting from 6 year olds. The poster condemned it along with a few people on the poster’s network.
One mentioned that teaching sex education to 6 year olds will teach them how to have sex. And yes I was riled up with that statement and there were a lot of reasons why, one of them being the inability to comprehend that someone with an above average academic level could come up with such a statement. I posted lengthy replies trying to enlighten these people what sex education really is, but I was still annoyed that the poster made those comments. I really shouldn’t have been ticked off so easily.
I realized that I got worked up for no reason and that they were just uninformed. My days in working with UNICEF allowed me to encounter people like these but I didn’t expect those who are good enough to earn a scholarship to be thinking in such manner. Anyway, I’m not here to rant about my annoyance toward the poster because I realized something. If a person with that academic level compares sex education to Kama Sutra, what will be the opinion of others?
The opinion of one does not reflect the general community and this may just be a hyperbolic statement but what if more than 70% of Malaysians think the same way? The only thing that worries me now is the mindset of the average Malaysians which honestly, don’t really sit on the bright side but I expected most of us to at least know what sex education really is.
Now we ask the question, why or how did this perception of sex education came to being? One thing I noticed was that most people see sex education as a thing of a Western culture and the general view of Malaysians towards the West is more of a negative outlook. It’s funny, I think there are a lot of things from the West that we could take, no, should have.
I guess another reason why most people are against sex education is because of the word “sex”. Being a conservative community, the word sex is something most would avoid talking about. Buying a condom off the counter will raise many eyebrows, at least to those who are observing. It’s known that there are teachers who are teaching science or Biology have trouble teaching materials on reproductive systems, and I do think that the parents in Malaysia would have the same difficulty when talking about the birds and the bees with their children.
So what’s the solution to this? I’m not sure of this, I could suggest a few but they would be the typical solutions. The problem here is mindset, an almost impossible task to change it. Perhaps we couldn’t change the mindsets of the present adults but we can try to instill it in the children today. The plan to implement sex education syllabus for 6 year old is going in the right direction. My only hope is that this proposal is executed properly and that the adults today do not play the role of a hindrance towards this development.
It’s odd that the adults are the one that are hard to reach. One would just have to refer to the debacle hovering about the proposal in implementing English as the language for Math and Science. To reach to the adults we would have to figure out how do they receive information and what affects their decision in constructing their perception towards an idea. I guess it’s not wise to generalize the public. We should accept the fact that there are many types of people and we would like our message to be received by a multitude of targets.
For now, we should probably focus on the future because maybe one day, we won’t have a situation of less than 40% of adults/parents who won’t have difficulty talking about the birds and the bees, who would know what advice to give to the young ones, to guide them to make informed choices.
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