The new nine-year sex education scheme for elementary and junior high schools will begin next year from the first grade.
Sex educators appealed yesterday for an enhancement of teachers' current abilities in the field, in accordance with the new scheme.
"The new scheme conforms with social change and brings materials up to date with children's needs. Teachers should be re-trained for the sake of delivering correct sexual knowledge to students," said Edwin Yen (晏涵文), a professor of health education and one of the scheme's planners, appointed by the Ministry of Education.
The ministry revised health education for elementary and high schools, and made public a new scheme for continual sex education last week.
The new scheme will include knowledge of such issues as body piercing, homosexuality, abortion, abuse, as well as legal aspects and sources of information and advice on sex matters, which have previously been ignored in sex education.
Currently, sex education in elementary and high schools mainly focuses on physiology and family planning.
Courses about sexual violence and protection from sexual abuse are only taught for four hours a semester, as stipulated by the Sex Abuse Prevention Act (性侵害防治法).
"Sex education is not simply knowledge about sex organs or gender roles as the old textbooks used to teach," Yen said. "A holistic sex education should cover issues of physiology, psychology, ethics and the law related to sex."
Mercy Memorial Foundation (
"Teachers' attitudes toward sex are crucial to the implementation of the new scheme," a high school student counselor, Chin Yu-mei (
Members of the foundation also emphasized that "sex education should be an education for life" and appealed to the ministry to extend the nine-year scheme to 12 years.
"Some knowledge about marriage and family planning is suitable to students in senior high school and hence is dismissed in the new scheme," the foundation members said, stressing that: "A complete sex education should start from kindergarten and go up to senior high school at least."
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