But to keep up with the times, new efforts to broaden the scope of sex ed are bubbling up.
A pornography-literacy course, titled The Truth About Pornography, was a recent addition to Start Strong, a peer-leadership program for teenagers headquartered in Boston and funded by the city’s public-health agency.
In Colorado, a new comprehensive, student-supported sex education bill is working its way through the state’s Legislature. It would require the teaching of safe sex, consent and sexual orientation, as well as bar abstinence-only sex education. If passed, Colorado would be the ninth state to require that consent be taught.
And today, the first guide to gender-inclusive puberty education was published by Gender Spectrum, a nonprofit organization that works to create gender-sensitive and inclusive environments for children.
Among other principles, the guide — intended to give educators tools they can incorporate into existing course materials — stresses the complexity of gender as the interrelationship between one’s body, identity and expression. The point, according to Gender Spectrum, is to “ensure that no student’s passage through puberty is stigmatized or made invisible.”
Perhaps leading the way is the British government, which last week announced a major change to the nation’s sex education curriculum, the first revision in decades. Starting in 2020, it will cover topics including same-sex relationships, transgender people, menstruation, sexual assault, forced marriage, pornography and sexting.
What do you think is the most urgent topic to add to sex ed curriculum? Let me know at dearmaya@nytimes.com.
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By the numbers
56 percent
That’s the percentage of 13- to 20-year-olds who said they know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns such as “they,” according to a 2016 study. Seventy-four percent also said they were more accepting of people with “nontraditional” gender identities than they were the year prior.
Source : Nytimes
