Faces of Sichuan Province (Photo : Getty Images)
A sex education textbook in China which said premarital sex for women is wrong was at the center of controversy because of its backward idea no longer applicable to the modern times.
Another sex education primer, this time for elementary school-age children, is also caught in controversy. Some critics find the book too progressive, while others view it as gratuitous and reckless.
Newschinamag reported that among the wrong things previously taught to Chinese kids which the new sex education primer aimed to address is where babies come from. The answer before were either the babies were born through cracks of stone or just found by their parents.
It skipped the part where the mother and father first had sexual intercourse, the mother conceived and carried the fetus for nine months and the infant came out through her vagina or caesarian section.
Peddling those bizarre myths were allowed even if in other areas, science was emphasized over superstition. The schools mouthed those myths until the 1970s.
However, in 1978, Beijing adopted the “Reform and Opening Up” policy and then the one-child policy. The kids raised on the myth learned about reproduction only when they reached their teens and were filled in about sex, pregnancy and childbirth by friends, literature and eventually the internet.
Despite some changes, Counterpunch blamed the lack of proper sex education among Chinese youth as the reason behind the serious health consequences on youngsters including more adolescents engaged in premarital sex, teenage pregnancy and abortion.
It was only in 2008 that the country’s Ministry of Education added sex education which should be taught from elementary school through senior high school. Information which answers the question “Where did I come from?” are supposed to be taught during the first and second grades in elementary school including basic knowledge about puberty, health and physical growth.
The primer, titled “Footsteps of Growing Up,” will come out in August and be distributed at the Dingfuzhuang Elementary School in Beijing. Here are samples of the primer’s text: “Sperm are eager to come out of the testicles in father’s scrotum, and they look like small, energetic tadpoles…” and “In order to allow his naughty sperm to find mom’s ovum, father puts his penis into mom’s vagina and forcefully ejaculates his sperm.”
