Do you Believe in the Power of Education? I am convinced of the vital importance of education. In particular, the education we receive as growing children and adolescents creates our basic common sense, cognition, and perspective. Each person sees, hears, and learns differently depending on their home and living environment, but if there is something in common, it is school education.
Public education, where you study the same subject with a fixed textbook, over the same time, is almost the same for all community members. Regardless of individual differences teachers and schools have a systematic education system to deliver uniform content. In the end, education in schools contributes to our basic understanding and perspective of our society. Education can also be considered socialization.
The same goes for sex education. Some parents and teachers recognise the importance of sex education and have high gender sensitivity, and some teenagers are interested and look up various materials on their own. But most young people learn only what is presented in home economics, biology or health classes at school, and are exposed to the influences of modern mass media. Based on this exposure, sexual knowledge and sexual perspectives are formed.
In an era where gender-related problems are constantly emerging, shouldn't education be adapted to confront these fundamental problems?
In the previous article <Sex Ed. Textbooks>, I outlined a sense of the problem of biased content and language contained in South Korea’s textbooks. This time, I would like to talk about how to create sex education that is useful in real life from a gender equality perspective based on the existing curriculum flow.
First of all, I’ve set out to design a new curriculum, encompassing areas of insufficiency found in the existing textbooks.
JeongYeon’s ReWritten 'Gender-Equality Sex Education' Curriculum
Existing textbooks deal with these contents when teaching <Adolescent Sexual Development>.
We should include more knowledge that teenagers need, like this...
When discussing <Fertilization and Pregnancy>…
An essential element of <Fertilization and Pregnancy> is of course, sex...
To <Create Healthy Gender Values>…
Education that aims not to suppress curiosity, but to present solutions.
Create Healthy Gender Values
To develop <Healthy Dating Practices for Teenagers>…
Learning about how to understand ourselves and others…
What do you think of the newly organized Gender-Equality Sex Ed. curriculum? I think that desirable sex education can be achieved only when this level of content is covered in detail in formal education settings.
Furthermore, I thought about what and how well students can learn through this education. The Sex Ed. learning goals that I aim for are as follows.
JeongYeon’s Rewritten 'Gender-Equality Sex Ed' Learning Goals
So what kind of education do middle school students want?
About a month after I started teaching the sex education unit, I asked my first grade middle school students to write down ‘what you want to know and learn about sex',
And the answers that came back were...
