Sex? A Healthy Sexuality Resource: Reflection 5

In class we discussed how sexual education is being taught in schools and our experiences with sex education when we were in school. When it came down to it the experiences were not great. Many facts were left out and most people from out class were taught the bare minimum, while some had not been taught any sexual education at all. This interested me because sexual education is something that I believe should be much more important in schooling.

            One of the things discussed in class was the sexual education book ( Sex? A Healthy Sexuality Resource) that is given out to students in Nova Scotia. As someone who has always lived here in Nova Scotia I was one of the lucky recipients of this book, with the help of the signature of my parents on a waver form. The waver form alone shows how sexual education is being taken maybe a bit too seriously in the wrong ways. Why should a parent’s signature be needed to learn about our own bodies? To me that just seems absurd. Especially because when my class was given the book we were not the ten year olds in grade four, but fifteen and in grade eight or nine. By that age we had all already taught ourselves what we thought we needed to know if our parents hadn’t already.

            Sexual education for me was not so much an in class thing, but was taught in the form of joke and teasing on the playground in junior high. The sex book that we were given added many more punch lines to these jokes around the school, only giving us more knowledge about things to make fun of, and not take seriously. We were given the book, but there were never any real classes that went along with it. While we did have a  health class it was very brief whenever it was about anything sexual, and focused more on healthy eating and staying away from drugs and alcohol, and what was mentioned about sex was not much more than ways to stay protected and the ever popular labeling diagrams reproductive organs.

            I think it is safe to say that in some ways sexual education has changed today. Both of my parents work in elementary schools; as a principal and a teacher. Today the sex education book is still distributed to schools in Nova Scotia to children in grade four. After our discussion about sexual education in class I went home and talked to my parents about what happens in their schools. Both of my parents didn’t have exact answers for me, seeing as neither of them teach grade four, but they both had positive things to say. Both of my parents have heard multiple children say they are excited to receive the sexual education book, and they have even heard more than one child say they are excited to read it with their parents and go over the information inside. I think that is definitely a step in the right direction. I think this really shows that children are more open to the topic than they were before. Today at twenty years old I still would not want to go through the contents of my book with my parents, but there are children around ten years old that are willing to do this. I think that this shows that there has been some improvement in the way that sexual education is treated in schools today, even compared to just a few years ago when I was in high school.

            From my experiences sexual education was not treated as a high priority. It was something that the teachers had to do and simply just got it over with. I would be very curious to find out how the curriculum in sexual education has changed in Nova Scotia, or if it has at all over the past couple of years. I would hope that today it is taught more openly in schools than it has been in the past.