Kamasutra for KIDS

 

 

If you are a typical middle class parent or family member, June 2007 could well have a shock in store for you. Your daughter attending class VI in school will be taught all the gory details of condom usage, including a mock demonstration from the class teacher using an actual condom. If she happens to be in class VII, she will be taught how ‘enjoyable’ sexual intercourse is and how there is no ‘right age’ to have sex. And if she is in the final year of school, i.e. class XII, she will be given lessons on ‘good parenting’; on how to care well for a new born.

There is more. Sex education lessons will now be ‘enacted’ by students and teachers inside a classroom. One of the new modules is about tackling molestation and sexual abuse. This will require a group of students to perform molestation scenes whereby students will ostensibly learn practical lessons on dealing with the outrage. Class VIII students will now get to write essays on bizarre topics like ‘If there were no clothes for anybody’; ‘If there were no condoms’ and ‘If the man had a uterus’.

This is not fantasy. Thousands of teachers are being currently trained to impart this post-modern version of sex education to all students in schools affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). Students going even to nursery and primary school will not be spared the wondrous revelations of sex education. This is the new diktat of the powers that be in the Ministry of Human Resource Development. Driven primarily by a new kind of ‘anti-AIDS activism’, the new sex education programmes in schools are aimed at dispelling myths and illusions about sex and helping children acquire knowledge that will help them prevent sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS. A TSI editorial team pieced all this together after getting exclusive access to the new sex education manuals and the teachers who are being trained to deliver these lessons.

This has triggered a firestorm of controversy, to borrow a cliché, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, with parents and teachers aghast at the move to ‘officially’ expose Indian school children to the birds and bees. Says Anupama Garg, mother of a 12-year-old school going girl, “Terrorism is a bigger threat than AIDS. Why are our children then not being given arms training in schools?” Moulana Shoukat Shah, President of Kashmir based Jamiyat-e-Ahlhadis is outraged. “Islam does not allow such things. I am sure even the Hindu culture shall not allow such a thing and we should all oppose the move. It is nothing more than opening new ways of debauchery,” he thunders. According to Dr. A. Kalanidhi, former Vice-chancellor of Anna University in Tamil Nadu, the new sex education lessons seem to be a poor attempt to ape western education systems and cultural values. He says, “Instead of teaching sex straight, we should follow alternate methods. The tragedy is, indians do practice double standards when it comes to matters related to sex

The lessons are shockingly straight.” In India, sex is often considered worse than a four-letter word. Despite romantics harping on the glories of the Kamasutra and the magnificence of temple architecture, the fact is that middle class India is extremely uncomfortable talking birds and bees. Especially when it comes to having a ‘frank’ conversation with children. Sure, there are some brave souls who gather the courage to discuss sex related issues with their growing children. But they are few and far between. An overwhelming majority of middle class Indian families are queasy about openly discussing sex, except lurid, locker room gossip between friends and contemporaries. To suddenly introduce such ‘free, frank and fearless’ dialogues between teachers and young school students on details related to sexual intercourse is nothing short of dropping a bombshell.

The tragedy is, Indians do practice double standards when it comes to matters related to sex. And millions of young children remain either ignorant about issues related to sex or are fed perversions through pornographic literature and films. This is the age of FTV and sexually explicit content that is available through movies, television shows and the Internet. Since children are already exposed to sexual imagery, innuendos, dialogues and content on a daily basis, it has perhaps become even more important for them to get credible information about the issue from reliable channels. And there is no doubt that AIDS is a looming menace that needs to be tackled on an urgent basis. In fact, an exclusive cover story in TSI (Issue dated December 2006) had exposed how India is grossly under prepared to tackle the AIDS epidemic that is threatening to explode across the country. Of course, a majority of Indian parents are aware of this problem and seem to think that children need sex education. An exclusive opinion poll conducted by ICMR on behalf of TSI across 7 major cities of India shows similar results. More than two thirds think that sex education in some form is required. Feels Vasanthi Martin, mother of a class V student in Chennai, “I welcome this. As a mother, I feel it is right to teach sex from the younger age. It will help them to tread carefully. The mysteries of sex will go. But there should not be stronger doses. Make it mild,” Psychiatrist Dr. Sameer Pareikh also feels strongly that school going children in India need to be given sex education for their own good, “If they are taught about sex in a scientific manner in their school, they will get complete, clear and scientific knowledge.”

The devil, as with many other things in India, lies in the details. One real life example will illustrate how practically difficult it will be to implement the new style sex education program in Indian schools. A Delhi University Lecturer, Poonam Pandey, has a daughter attending class IX in a ‘respectable’ public school. Her teacher made girl students draw pictures of male sexual organs on the classroom blackboard. Poonam’s daughter was chided by the teacher for not drawing a ‘larger’ organ in front of the entire classroom. Poonam’s complaints were shrugged off by the school authorities who said that it was all part of sex education. A class X student Shree was embarrassed even more by her male teacher. “Once in our class test, we were asked to draw a female private organ and while I was drawing it, my teacher took the copy from me and showed it to the whole class saying, ‘see, what a beautiful diagram she has made’. I was embarrassed to death,” she says.

The powers that be at the Ministry of Human Resource Development must be aware of the fact that hundreds of thousands of school children face indirect or even direct abuse from perverted teachers. To be sure, most teachers do their best to provide a good education. But the black sheep among them are large enough in numbers to take advantage of the new sex education lessons and make a mockery of the whole thing. One module on molestation talks about how a hypothetical girl Vani is travelling on a bus and how a man touches her buttocks and other private parts. What if a pervert masquerading as a teacher decides to don the grease paint and become a method actor? Such scenarios cannot be dismissed as alarmist. The horrifying incidents in Nithari in Noida where perverted criminals have allegedly sexually abused, tortured and brutally murdered more than 30 young children is proof of the disease that lurks in the underbelly of India. If the entire police machinery of Noida simply ignored such gruesome crimes because the victims happened to be from a poor background, what can poor parents expect from authorities when their children are sexually abused in schools? As it is, the media carries reports almost everyday from some corner of India where a teacher has been routinely sexually abusing school children and getting away with it. In fact, middle class hypocrisy and double standards could well result in a situation where parents keep quiet about the sexual harassment of their children for fear of ‘public scandal and humiliation’. This unseemly rush to introduce such controversial lessons is a strange decision by the Ministry of Human Resource Development that is otherwise suspicious of ‘western’ influences. In July 2006, the same Ministry rejected a proposal called ‘One Laptop per Child’. The reasons given were quite interesting: “India must not allow itself to be used for experimentation with children in this area... The age group 6-12 is a highly vulnerable age group to cover... even in the US, the debate between those who believe computers to be good for children and those who have the opposite view has been quite polarised and shrill.”

Most parents are shocked that the Ministry can reject computers as a potentially ‘harmful’ western influence and readily accept sexually explicit lessons with classroom demonstrations in the same breath. The fact of the matter is, the decision is controversial; it is bound to arouse anger and passion. This is quite unfortunate, given the fact that our education system has been such a failure that close to 400 million are still illiterate and millions of poor children do not get the benefit of even a basic primary education because there are no schools near where they live. The brouhaha over birds and bees will deflect attention from this glaring failure, a failure for which citizens must demand answers from the people who run the education system in India.