Comprehensive sex courses have been made available in middle
schools in more than 10 major Chinese cities, including Shanghai,
Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chongqing, Xi'an and Harbin.
These cities have compiled their own textbooks, covering sexual
ethics, behavior, procreation and contraception, AIDS prevention
and anti-drug warnings. Sex-related topics were previously
considered forbidden areas in teenage sex education.
The successful experience in sex education in these cities will be
summed up and put into broader use in other cities and rural areas,
making all middle school students at the time of puberty able to
receive adequate sex knowledge, according to officials of the
Ministry of Education.
The move is aimed at preventing teenage pregnancies, sex crimes,
overpopulation crisis, AIDS epidemics and other sexually
transmitted diseases, and also at satisfying young people's desire
to know more about sex and health.
In
China about 20 million children reach puberty annually.
Local governments have realized that young people are facing bigger
health dangers related to sex, illustrated by rising cases of
pre-marital sexual intercourse, accidental pregnancies, induced
abortions and sexual diseases, which are largely blamed on earlier
sexual maturity, delayed age of marriage and child-bearing, and,
most of all, more open-minded attitudes towards sex than in the
time of the previous generation, according to Pu Wei, a scholar at
the Research Center for Media and Youth under the Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences.
Chinese society is at a turning point, and sex issues are under
influences from both modern liberal ideas likely to tolerate more
privacy and traditional conservative concepts featuring
restraint.
On
one hand more and more young people accept sexual relations before
marriage and at lower and lower ages. On the other hand, they lack
information, and are not able to get such information from official
sources, said Liu Dalin, a sex education expert in Shanghai.
According to an official survey, middle school students acquire 80
percent of their sexual knowledge, not from schools and their
parents, but from books, magazines, TV programs and the Internet,
which are likely to be misleading. Moreover, 11 percent of boys
surveyed and three percent of girls admitted that they had obtained
sex information from obscene sources.
Education experts have noted that sketchy knowledge about
adolescence was available ten years ago in all middle schools
across the country, yet few teachers and even fewer parents were
willing to explain sex to young people.
Proper sex education in middle schools will help young people learn
knowledge and skills ensuring safe and healthy sex and procreation,
and furthermore help them to make a right choice of life style,
according to Liu Hanbin, deputy director of the Family Planning
Association of China.
"Now is the time to change the traditional ideology of sexual
avoidance and to give up unsophisticated teaching methods which
simply preached moral standards," he stressed.
The opening of the sex courses has received wide acclaim both from
teachers and parents in the cities, which is uncommon considering
strong resistance from many parents a decade ago against the
offering of a physiological hygiene course which involved minimum
sexual information.
"We felt embarrassed at the beginning, but we soon got used to it
in the frank and pleasant atmosphere of the class," said Zhong
Jing, a senior middle school girl of the 13th Vocational High
School in Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang
Province.
(Xinhua News
Agency November 23,2001)