Sarah Evans: Sex education is not at school

Mar 4 2010 By Sarah Evans

There is such hypocrisy around when society at large starts to pontificate about education.

Nowhere is it more blatant than in the area of sex education, the supposed inadequacy of which is the sole cause of our degenerate society in the view of many.

We now have compulsory sex education starting from the moment children enter full time education and what can and can’t be taught is increasingly prescribed. Every school has to have a sex education policy. Although sex education is still considered rather modern, our approach has Victorian overtones. It is something separated from other aspects of the curriculum tucked away in its own box with its own rules for opening. Recent controversy has surrounded whether these rules can be different in different sorts of schools but that misses the point.

However much is undertaken in school, whatever the content is, the sex education children receive in schools is a tiny drop in the ocean of what they pick up elsewhere. The most brilliant sex education in the world, supposing anyone could ever agree what that was, is nothing compared with the huge and largely unregulated sexual images and language to which children are exposed every waking moment of their day, highlighted in last week’s Home Office report Sexualisation of Young People.

How adults can make such a fuss about should and shouldn’t be said about sex in school, when the internet, magazines, billboards, videos, music send out demeaning explicit and implicit sexual messages every minute, is a mystery.

There is a contradiction at the heart of education about what it means to prepare children for adult life. Is it adult life as adults today have apparently deemed acceptable, in which case sex education might be a run through of lap dancing, lad mags, the marital infidelities of male sporting heroes, demonising the female body or how to dress sexily at 11 and so on. Or is education about bringing children up to challenge the values of the adult world?

It is not teachers that need to be monitored, instructed and inspected for their soundness on sex education. It is everyone else that needs to get their act together and start ensuring that children are not surrounded by pornography and sordid adult examples at every turn.

* Sarah Evans, Principal, King Edward VI High School for Girls