Sex Education

Should our schools be teaching sex education at all? Recently, a Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) Legal Office executive secretary Atty. Jo Imbong and 30 other parents haled the Department of Education (DepEd) to court in filing a class suit against education officials over sex education.This current controversy is about the United Nations Population Fund and Department of Education (DEP-ED) project, which is being piloted this month in primary and high schools and aims to promote safe sex, limit the spread of HIV-AIDS and prevent unwanted pregnancies. Accordingly, the government had planned to implement the program in 159 elementary and high schools this year and that this sex education project covers topics such as reproductive systems and cycles, hygiene, pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

According to a website of a religious community, “they are concerned with the manner sex education will be taught to intermediate elementary pupils and high school students, …. and they will continue to mobilize their faithful to be on the lookout for sex education modules being taught in government-run schools.”
When teaching anything, the framework or perspective is crucial. What are we promoting? In this sense, the training of teachers on this project is crucial. One DEP-ED legal official said that last year, sex education was already being taught in our schools under the subject Adolescent Reproductive Health and that then there was no controversy. Education Secretary Mona Valisno said that the teaching modules which will be integrated in other subjects such as science are designed to be scientific and informative and that the modules were written by professionals, including psychologists, who made sure the discussions would be educational and that “they are not designed to titillate prurient interests."

The Webster Dictionary defines prurient as “ having or encouraging an excessive interest in sexual matters.” Because, there is a brewing court case (sub judice), we will have to refrain from discussing on the merits of the case. But, suffice it to say for now that Philippine jurisprudence in defining what is obscene still uses the Miller v. California (37 L.Ed. 2nd 419, 431 1973) as the obscenity test : “Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest … (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (c) whether the work taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”


Traditionally, sex education as we know it in the academe, is more discussed in the biological sense and so over time it has evolved to the academic subject sexuality education and thus it is taught more broadly in the sociological and psychological tradition and the subject includes thematic discussions on gender and development and women’s human rights. More, importantly, for girl and boy children, the teaching of the subject has shifted from demographics and population control and numbers towards the recognition of the individual and bodily rights of each human being.

Sexuality and education have much to do with each other. When our social institutions like the academe and the church decide on whether information about our sexuality should be part of our education, this is tantamount to defining the parameters on how much education we must have pertaining to our life, bodily rights, autonomy and general well-being. Who should be responsible for sex education or sexuality education of our children? Should sex education be the sole prerogative of parents? My sense is that whoever is deemed in charge for our children’s education must do so with the best interests of the child as a primary consideration. And, where is the child in this conflict between the social institutions that are supposed to decide for the “best interests of the child”? Should we not be evoking some of the answers from the children whose worldview is constantly evolving?