Selective And Critical Account Of Sexuality Education

Give a selective and critical account of the sexuality education you received at school.

Constantly being bombarded with images of STD’s and being told what is normal and what isn’t are common protocols through which students are taught about sexuality in many schools today. Me being just one of the many students, who experienced such education which brought to light for me that a lot of information is missing in our classrooms. In this essay I will be discussing my experience of what was taught to me in sexuality education at high school, and how it shaped my understanding at that time. The topics I will be discussing involve heteronormative practices, teenage pregnancies, and the missing discourse of desire. I believe that there is a lot

My experience of learning about Teenage Pregnancy has had quite a negative approach, in which it has always been conceptualised as a problem. This is probably not my experience only, but many other students around the country where it seems that “Early motherhood has become synonymous with a number of social problems” (McDermott et al., 2005 pp59). There also seems to be a common trend where teachers tend to associate ‘consequences’ with Teenage Pregnancies in classrooms, in attempt to discourage individuals from having unprotected sex or just abstaining from sex overall. My teacher being one of them used this method and it introduced fear within individuals in the class, suggesting to us that if you get pregnant/get a girl pregnant your life is over, or at least downhill from that point forward. He also used the fear of social concerns where it is unacceptable for a girl to get pregnant and they will always be looked down upon from the wider society including the parents. So to prevent such circumstances we were taught prevention strategies for teenage pregnancy, which involved the use of condom, abstinence or just aborting the child in case of such “misfortune” as my teacher would say. Our teacher never offered support in case any students wanted to keep their child because there is a common notion that teenage pregnancy is a bad thing and it would affect your education and lead you to a poor lifestyle. This statement is supported by McDermott et al. (2005, pp59-60) who states that “young mothers are portrayed as passive victims and a vulnerable group in need of support”. It is rather ironic that many believe that young mothers are a ‘vulnerable group in need of support’, as the knowledge which would allow young mothers to support themselves is rarely given through sexuality education in the first