P.P.T.A. votes for school sex education

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33934, 29 August 1975, Page 2

P.P.T.A. votes for school sex education

! From our education reporter) WELLINGTON, August 28. Support for the introduction of courses on human development and relationships, including sex education, into State secondary schools was given today by the annual conference of the Post- Primary Teachers' Association.

Last year, the confer-, ence of the association accepted the principle that schools must undertake such education. Delegates to this year’s conference agreed that courses on human development and relationships should be a required part of the curriculum.

Allowance should be made, however, for pupils to be ; withdrawn from classes when parents objected to material covered, the conference decided. The Department of Education will be asked to appoint a curriculum-development .officer with full-time respon(sibility for human develop:ment and relationship courses! in schools. ■ In-service courses fori teachers to consider the aims] of the new courses were also! recommended, and the Department of Education publication. “Human Development and Relationships in the Schoo] Curriculum,” was accepted as a guide to the .aims and content of the sexieducation aspects of the human-development courses.

( Parent consultation ! The effect of the conference decision will be that !many subjects once, considiered taboo in secondary (schools will be freely discussed, and schools will adopt methods in the new courses worked out in close consultation with parents and local communities. Proposing that the courses be introduced. Mr J. R. Kelly, I the principal of Fairfield College, Hamilton, said that too often human development and relationship courses had been assumed to be synonymous with sex education. “For example, the Concerned Parents Association charged out of cover under the disguise of a Christchurch post-office box number, seeing danger under every educational stone, and Satan promoting every new curriculum development.”

Sex aspect The new P.P.T.A. proposals sought to remove the overemphasis on sex education: human relationships were not just a matter of sleeping together, but of living and working together, and this was where the emphasis of the schools must lie. Mr Kelly said. The community was now reaping the harvest of its neglect in assuming that what

the schools did not teach ■ 'homes would teach. “This is the harvest of the! philosophy of ears closed j and eyes shut to the needs of the young in the hope thatj if we refuse to recognise] trouble it will pass us by. I But we cannot assume in the light of our own professional responsibilities that ignorance will effect its own cure !

Pupils ’in vacuum* I "Our programmes and philosophies do not sufficiently attempt the develop-, ■ment of the individual’s appreciation of himself as a human being, and of his: relationships with others and the world about him. Too (often the pupil is educated !in a kind of vacuum, in which we strive primarily to! (improve standards of literacy' (and mathematics, too seldom /elating these concepts to the! ;woNd in which the adolescent; (is now struggling to adjust,! and in which he will soon! have to struggle to survive.” For too long teachers and the community had hoped; that with maturity would: come the ability to make rea-; soned judgments, forgetting that maturity came through; judgment, and not vice! versa. He questioned whether,! without contact with the! “real issues” of life, the skills of reasoned judgment could| be learned. “And without those skills: our children will be left to! inherit the sometimes-: frightening dogmas and! prejudices of the present adult generation which tend; to divide rather than unite humanity,” Mr Kelly said. !