Innocence Lost

Mar 09, 2009 Editorial

We have commended the Ministry of Education on several occasions on the comprehensiveness of its curriculum for our Primary Schools. This department establishes the necessary foundation on which any hoped-for success in the later stages must be established.

It is therefore not unexpected that a wide array of topics would be introduced in a cursory fashion with the expectation that they would be deepened further down the road.

After all, child development experts, from Piaget onwards, have confirmed the age old wisdom that just as with the physical body, the mind of the child with its nexus with the emotions is not a just a simple, smaller replica of the adults’. The weaning of children, therefore, including their education, must be undertaken in stages that take into cognisance the overall development the individuals would have reached at various age levels.

While, for instance, in cognitive matters we will always have the odd genius like J.S. Mill who could spout Latin and Greek by the age of eight, most children fall into well-defined development groups correlated with age. Indeed this reality forms the very basis for the division of our educational system into primary, secondary and tertiary levels.

And this brings us to the matter on which we wish to stimulate some discussion – the introduction of the topic of HIV/AIDS on the curriculum of our Primary Schools during the past few years. Now it is unquestioned that over the past decade HIV/AIDS has become a major public health problem in Guyana and as such the population at large must be sensitised to its ramifications, treatment and prevention.

The Government of Guyana, with the support of foreign agencies, has in the interval, embarked on a massive public awareness programme about the disease that could not have failed to alert every man, woman and child about its dangers.

Some of the HIV/AIDS commercials that are broadcast during children’s programming raise the same concerns that we have about the manner in which the topic is being dealt with in our Primary Schools – their explicitness and details of the sex acts through which most of the virus is transmitted.

We must remember that we are dealing with a pool of children who are between five-plus and eleven-plus, that is, who are preponderantly prepubescent. We believe that these children would be best served if the subject of HIV/AIDS were dealt with primarily from a scientific perspective stressing, for instance, the virus’ destruction of the body’s immunological system.

The irony is that the Ministry’s primary school curriculum has determined that the children are not ready to deal with the immunity system per se, but are mature enough for a discussion of how to protect oneself against the HIV/AIDS virus during “regular” sex in addition to its oral and anal variants. In our estimation, we do not believe that children in this age group are emotionally ready: the coverage is inappropriate.

The question, as it always is in such matters, is whether the activity is in the best interest of the children. In this instance we have to balance the benefits of the knowledge transmitted to them versus the possible harm it can cause to their impressionable minds.

Firstly, while there has been an unfortunate high incidence of sexual abuse of prepubescent children, there has been no study that indicated significant voluntary sexual activity that would benefit from knowledge of HIV/AIDS prevention. The subject would most appropriately be dealt with in the Secondary School division.

What we do know is that the detailed and explicit information might confer a jaundiced long term perspective on sex to the youngsters, not to mention a state of fevered alarm in the present. What has happened is that under the pretext of dealing with a medical problem, our Ministry of Education for all intents and purposes has introduced the subject of “sex education” in our Primary Schools.

And we suggest that this might more properly be a subject that is given a much wider discussion – especially including parents – before it becomes the norm that establishes an unwelcome norm.

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