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Sex education: a failure in Chinese schools
By Li Xing
July 26, 2004
Beijing - Wu Ruomei received a phone call recently from a high school boy who
declared that he would make love with a girl "right now."
"All right. But why?" Wu, a senior editor of Chinese Middle School Student's
Newspaper, asked calmly.
The boy told Wu that he wanted to make love with his "girlfriend" because all
his classmates had done so, although he admitted that he did not really like
the girl and would break up with her soon.
When Wu asked the boy if he would accept a future wife who had had a similar
experience before marriage, the boy yelled "No!" without hesitation.
Then the boy thought of another idea -- he'd go to a prostitute instead.
Although Wu finally, after 40 minutes of phone conversation, persuaded the boy
to give up his idea of "sex," she still felt stressed. What let her feel a
little bit relieved was that the boy trusted her and called her before he
acted, the editor said later.
As a guest hostess of a student program on the Beijing Radio Station for eight
years, Wu has encountered too many students felling confused and trapped by
love and sex. "I receive numerous letters about school love and sex. Those
about pregnancy came to me every week," she said.
Statistics from the Beijing Gynecology and Obstetrics Hospital show that since
1998, half of those who receiving abortions were unmarried, and 14 percent of
them were under the age of 20.
Students are taught English and computer in classrooms and physical education
on playgrounds. But they get no information about love and sex except from
secretly-spread "pocket books" and pornographic websites. In a world crammed
with sex movies and advertisements, Chinese students get little knowledge of
sex from school. Many of them are pining for a straightforward, simple and
practical way to get help.
China Youth Daily recently reported in a whole page interviews with student
newspaper editors, experts and middle school students.Titled "The Most Failing
Education," the interviews lamented the poor education students receive and the
bitter sex adventures they had.
"We can't get to know what sex really is and how it will affect us," said
third-year middle school boy Cai Xuemin of Lanzhou, capital of northwest
China's Gansu Province. "We have textbooks on physiology, but our teacher
skipped that chapter in class and said nothing about it."
Maybe that is why a book published early this year called "The Rose Hidden in
the Schoolbag -- Interviews on School Sex" became so popular.
The book reported some surprising facts: half of the total 13 interviewees of
the book were "good students"; one third of them were studying in renowned
schools; none of them used condoms in their first time; none of their parents
and teachers knew about their sexual activities and all the interviewees were
unsatisfied with their current sex education.
"We cannot draw any conclusions or indicate anything about school sex because
our samples are too few. We are just giving facts," said Zhang Yinmo, one of
the book's authors.
In half a year, the book has been reprinted six times, and by June its sales
reached 160,000. Although the expected major readers were parents and teachers,
the book spread quickly among students.
"We like this book because we got scientific and friendly information from it,
which we need but can't get from school," said a student.
Current Chinese sex education for students is out of step with social
development, said Zhuang Yan, expert on minor sex educationand sexology. It was
urgent to get rid of old thoughts and give practical help to them, Zhuang said.
"Teachers need improving, too. Many teachers don't have enough knowledge on
this subject," Zhuang said. According to Wei Haiyan, a teacher with the No. 9
Middle School in Lanzhou, no schools in the city have special or trained
teachers on sex education.
"But teachers and textbooks are not enough," said the other author of "Rose,"
Sun Yunxiao. "They need to know what will happenif they do have sex and catch a
disease or get pregnant, apart from the biological process of a sperm and an
ovum combining each other. They need to talk with grown-ups."
While adults debate whether sex education should be given and how it would
work, young people are already experimenting on theirown. But most of those
interviewed said that their first time wasa complete failure.
"It was actually a mess. I had no one to consult and was very stressed," said a
boy recalling his first sexual experience in thefirst year of high school, when
he was about 16.
"We didn't know what sex really was," said a girl who did it for first time at
18. "We kissed and made love just for the sake of kissing and making love. No
one told me anything realistic."
Most Chinese parents are passive and embarrassed to talk about sex with their
children. "Just like ostriches hiding their heads in the sand to avoid seeing
threats," said Sun.
It is more important to teach children a sense of responsibility than to blame
or avoid talking with them, said Wu. "They need help to understand love. It
cannot be gotten from textbooks or homework, only from communication."
She mentioned the boy who intended to make love "right now." "Our conversation
would not have continued for one minute if I had said 'No' at the beginning.
Instead, I discussed it with him and helped him make the decision. Young people
need help to know and think more about sex," she said.
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Sex
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