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The recent Ujian Penilaian Sekolah Rendah (UPSR) or Primary School Assessment Test results revealed positive improvements compared to last year in the number of pupils scoring all A’s. The result revealed that 9.51% students gained straight A’s this year compared to 9.19% last year.
Sex education should be properly implemented in schools.
The overall national average grade has also increased by one percent and the gap between rural and urban pupils achieving excellent results this year was 3.64 per cent compared to 4.22 per cent last year. Though these commendable statistics attest the promising progression of our youths in their academics as well as the efficacy our education system there’s still plenty of rooms for improvement in other areas of the curriculum.
A scholarly youngster doing well in school is very promising, but this doesn’t necessary ensure that he or she will develop into a responsible adult. We’ve all heard about good-girl-gone-bad math genius Sufiah Yusof who first made headlines in 1997 when she gained entry into St Hilda's College, Oxford at the age of 13. From then on the headlines she made was for another matter altogether (in 2001, Sufiah went missing and later became a social escort). Last we heard she took on a job as a social worker. Although we can hope for the best for her in her new vocation and no matter how objectionable her pass decisions in life may be, she must have learned a lot from the school of hard knocks.
Whether we like it or not, there’s more to being a good human being than getting good grades. There are a lot of external influences that affects our kids and the easy access to the internet with its high-speed information and social network sites does make our kids more susceptible to straying towards the dark side. So its more important now than ever to get our kids to learn proper social and interactive skills, particularly sex - not teaching them how to do it, but, rather how to be responsible if and when they choose to do it.
Especially when we have cases of underage sex, teenage pregnancies, STDs and abandoned babies on the rise, there’s no question that our youths need to be properly informed on sex as this would not only help reduce or prevent these cases from ascending to preposterous proportion but also propels our education system to another level of well-rounded excellence.
Sex Ed: Only in the future?
Talk of including sex education more extensively in our school curriculum has been going on for quite some time yet there’s not much seen in implementation. It’s still talk. The topic has already been included in our school syllabus but it’s just implemented as a brief part of other subjects like biology, moral and Islamic studies and physical education, not as a subject on its own. Usually whenever “sex education” is mentioned in the news what comes after the term is usually: “in the future”. It’s understandable that a lot of things must be straightened out before the subject is introduced in schools especially when it’s such a provocative yet delicate subject though a plan of action has to be materialise soon.
Women's Aid Organisation Executive Director Ivy N. Josiah believes sex education is definitely an effective way to curb teenage pregnancy.
“As far as I know it (sex education) has not been introduced in schools. We’ve been told that it has been implemented but not in every school. From what I understand there’s a lot of objection from parents and teacher in both urban and rural areas,” said the Executive Director of Women’s Aid Organisation Ivy N. Josiah in a phone interview.
Ivy told Malaysian Digest that ‘Sex Education’ has been renamed ‘Reproductive Health Education’ as parents perceived the term ‘sex education’ means we’re teaching our children how to have sex.
“Now we’re looking at emphasizing on a more holistic approach where we teach children to respect our bodies and each other as well as have the confidence and responsibilities that comes together when they do decide to have sex,” Ivy said adding that implementing the subject is definitely an effective way to curb unwanted pregnancies.
“In most parts of Europe there has been a huge drop in unwanted (pregnancy?) once sex education was introduced in schools there,” she pointed out.
In August, National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP) president Hashim Adnan said there was no need for a separate subject on sex education. All that was needed, he said, was to expand the teaching of sex education in several existing subjects. Meanwhile, education director-general Tan Sri Alimuddin Mohd Dom was equally reluctant in this move saying that they already have a set curriculum and they can’t simply change it. He added that if many quarters bring it up, they will “consider it... perhaps in the future”.
Our future generation are at risk
The government has been reluctant to introduce sex education in schools fearing a backlash, especially from the conservative rural population. Controversial as the subject of sex may be, especially in Asian culture, the worrying statistics on underage sex, teenage pregnancies, STDs and abandoned babies itself tells us how uninformed kids are about sex.
A survey by National Population and Family Development Board (LPPKN) revealed last August shows an excessive level of ignorance among teenagers and young adults about rudimentary sexual and reproductive health. Half of the 1,700 respondents, aged between 13 to 24 years old, did not know how babies were born, while two out of five did not know where the foetus developed.
Another study done by Universiti Malaya in 2006 showed 25 percent of the 2,005 girls surveyed believed they could get pregnant by just sleeping next to a man. Ten percent had also said a woman would not get pregnant if she was not turned on during sex, while 47 percent did not know the answer.
HIV/AIDs and STDs on the rise
If so many young people lacks basic knowledge in sexuality and reproduction, it’s no wonder the rate of HIV/Aids and other STDs are on the rise.
Last June itself, Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai has expressed his concern on the worrying rise of free sex and drug abuse that contributed to HIV and Aids infection among youths in this country. Liow said that a total of 84,630 HIV cases had been reported in the country since 1986 until 2008. Concurrently, The Malaysian AIDS Council reported that out of the total, 10,000 people have died of AIDS since 1986.
“Of that, 3,692 HIV cases were reported last year, and what worried us was that 78.4 percent (of the total since 1986) or 66,418 people were between 13 and 39 years old,” Liow stated.
Meanwhile, in July, statistics from the Malaysian police indicate that about 100 babies are abandoned in the country very year and a newborn is abandoned in the Klang Valley every 10 days. The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) Malaysia also initiated a study recent and noted that abandoning babies was a serious social issue and there was a need for a safe haven for abandoned babies.
“More than 50 million of the 190 million women who become pregnant each year have abortions and many of these are clandestine and performed under unsafe conditions,” states UNFPA assistant representative Yeoh Yeok Kim, adding that comprehensive sex education was also a strategy to curb and halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in the country.
The above statistics and statements really is a bad sign for our future generation and our culture. We have to prepare and inform our kids about sex early in their lives as the number of sexually active minors are getting younger and younger with time. In-depth research must be done on the ideal age to teach them as well as coming up with a suitable teaching method.
Sex is not a taboo
Whether we like it or not, we all have to get past seeing sex as a taboo. Even if we want to to promote abstinence, the subject of sex needs to be mentioned. Maybe, it is better to teach our kids the best way to avoid consequences of having sex but at the same time we have to face the fact and realise that pre-marital sex is an inescapable fact of modern life. There will come a time when an adolescent have to make an adult decision if and when they resolve to ’trying it out’, and when they do, they should know they ought to use contraceptives. They also have to be informed on what to do if they are faced with the consequences for not practicing safe sex (STDs and pregnancy).
As parents and teachers, we must understand that teenagers are curious and rebellious by nature, and these days they are smarter (but not necessarily wiser) too. An adult may give a lecture to a 16 year old boy with raging hormones warning him of the risks of having sex but they may ruminate along the lines of: “Yeah right. It’s easy for you to say since you’ve ‘done it’. Anyway, later on you’ll be going home to ‘get it on’ with your wife aren‘t you? Why? Because sex feels good…”
Sex can be an intricate subject matter but, all things considered, we have to get past sex being a taboo and teach our children that we all make mistakes. While some slip-ups are more detrimental than others, the most important thing is to be responsible enough to own up and learn from them - and this goes out to kids as well as all us adults alike.
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