It is ironical that the Committee on Petitions, consisting of Rajya Sabha members, should have picked the day it did last week to stress India’s unique cultural and social status in the world. The Committee’s report, while making a recommendation to do away with sex education in schools maintained, in the words of the BJP’s Venkaiah Naidu who was heading the commission that : “Our country’s social and cultural ethos are such that sex education has absolutely no place in it.”  

It is ironical because on the same day that the Committee’s decision was being made public, lawmakers in North Carolina were  tentatively approving a Bill that would let parents choose whether their children should study the current abstinence-until-marriage curriculum, or one that also discussed contraception, or even skip sex education altogether; social conservatives have been objecting for long that marriage is devalued if children are taught about contraception they could use if they are sexually active. 

Regardless of what Mr. Naidu might believe, sex in the classroom, whether as a subject of scientific study or as education has been a touchy issue for people the world over. When Alfred C. Kinsey published his pioneering research on sexual behavior in the US in 1948 and 1953, alarmed critics in the press described the study as a threat to the stability of the American family. The circumstances at the time — it was the dawn of the nuclear age and the beginning of the Cold War era — a time of political and social strife from which the family symbolised the only safe refuge, led some even in the scientific community to join religious heads and cultural commentators in a fight to defend the traditional domestic realm.  

... contd.