Karnataka - Bangalore   

`Withdraw manual on sex education'

Staff Reporter

BANGALORE: If the State Government has its way, students in standard VI and upwards will learn "how to protect themselves from HIV-AIDS infection".

The Government has prepared a teaching document, "Life Skill Module," sourcing inputs from National AIDS Control Organisation, UNICEF, UNESCO and NCERT. The manual for the Sex Education Programme in schools has activities such as "Immune System Dance".

A boy asks a girl to dance with him, symbolising physical union, and the girl makes the boy wear a condom cap (Page 187 of the manual). In the Wildfire Game (Page 195), the students are asked to enact the game of being afflicted with AIDS, and the ways of avoiding being trapped in its tentacles.

A convention organised by All India Democratic Students' Organisation (AIDSO) and the All India Mahila Samskruthika Sanghatane (AIMSS) here on Friday, has demanded that this manual be withdrawn immediately. A resolution to this effect was passed by the convention, which called for a debate involving parents, teachers, educationists and psychologists on the issue before "experimenting" with young minds in this manner.

The former Vice-Chancellor of Bangalore University M.S. Thimmappa said: "Typically, adolescents can be considered to be physically, mentally, and emotionally fit to receive such inputs. The manual has been prepared to impart sex education for 10 and 11-year-olds. This is only an invitation to disaster."

Advocate Ravi Verma Kumar, former Chairman of the Backward Classes Commission, said this syllabus for sex education must be rejected totally as it was "age and culture inappropriate." V.N. Rajashekhar, Secretary, AIDSO Karnataka, said studies in the U.S. where sex education had been introduced at the school level in the 1960s, have shown that as a means to fight the spread of AIDS, sex education was a "remedy worse than malady".

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