That's what the Madhya Pradesh government tends to think when it comes to the issue of imparting sex education in schools. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the state has stopped sex education classes for high school students after it found that illustrations in an instruction manual for teachers were "obscene".
The sex education classes were part of the Adolescence Education Programme (AEP) for Class IX and above, aimed at creating AIDS awareness among students. The "objectionable" illustrations were diagrams of male and female bodies in four pages of the manual. The BJP government found it too much to take.
"The chief minister (Shivraj Singh Chouhan) has instructed the school education department to stop imparting sex education and informed the union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Arjun Singh about it," an official said.
And the government also has the gall to suggest an alternative. Sex education in Madhya Pradesh schools will be replaced by yoga classes. School Education Minister Narottam Mishra told the state Assembly last week that instead of imparting sex education to school students, they will be taught yoga.
One cannot say yoga is bad, but... as an alternative to sex education? Maybe the council of ministers there need sex education classes before the kids do.
Sex education is not a sensitive issue; prudes, who constitute an overwhelmingly large proportion of the populace, suffer from the proverbial ostrich syndrome. They would rather live in denial and babble about birds and bees.
Meanwhile, we can let AIDS spread. We will see later — which spreads faster: AIDS or obscenity.
