New sex education course saves blushes

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal">KOLKATA: Should we call it the horns of dilemma?<br /><br />The state school education department, overwhelmed by howls of protest from the teaching community about the "too-horny-to-teach" guidelines for sex and AIDS-awareness in schools, has been forced to call for a massive bout of Bowdlerisation.<br /><br />The altered set of guidelines, titled <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">Jibanshailir Shiksha: Shikshakder Jonyo Shikshanbidhi</span> (Learning about Art of Living: Guidelines for Teachers) like the earlier one, tries to teach teachers how to approach the subjects —considered taboo till the other day — without blushing.<br /><br />This will be found less in-the-face by the average government schoolteacher, which was the impression the reaction of the teaching community (led by the CPM-affiliated All-Bengal Teachers'' Association) gave.But the West Bengal AIDS Prevention and Control Society, asked to "revise" the earlier draft, is not "fully confident" that this is going to be its final stab at Bowdlerisation.<br /><br />Not that they have not tried. The earlier draft laid more importance on teaching safe sex to students; this stresses the importance of saying ''no'' and identifies the traits that help.<br /><br />More geared towards saving teachers the blushes, the guidelines stress on interactive classroom exercises. Teachers are asked to stay in the background after helping students simulate real-life conversational situations.<br /></div> </div><div class="section2"><div class="Normal"><br />The chapters on male and female anatomy and topics like masturbation are still there. But knowledge about these, and the other more "embarrassing" topics, are disseminated through index cards (each such card mentions one widely-held belief, spells out whether it is true or false and then gives the explanation).<br /><br />But, even after all this, the organisation that has had to take the trouble of changing its own creation is not very sure whether it will be spared the trouble of a third revision. "Frankly, even I do not know whether this is the last of the revisions," WBAPCS director Suresh Kumar said.<br /><br />The guidelines will be given to the teachers'' fronts and then discussed, where officials and teachers'' representatives will be present. Till then, the society is keeping its fingers crossed in the hope that it will not have to use them again.</div> </div>