In South Carolina today, a bill was
passed to update the sex education law. However, in order for it to
pass, the lawmakers had to remove the provision of the bill that
required the sex ed teachers be certified to teach it. As a student
having gone through sex ed 5th, 6th, 7th,
and 8th grade, I don't think I ever questioned whether my
teachers were certified to teach it. Do you think certification
should be required?
This reminds me of an episode of The
Office, called Sex Ed (S7,E4). They have a day at the office for sex
education and one of the employees takes it upon himself to teach it.
His justification is that he was a resident assistant in college.
Even though this is in a workplace versus a school, it brings up the
same idea that it usually is not taught by someone who has taken
certification courses.
Here is a video with some deleted
scenes from the episode but the specific part I am talking about is
around 40 seconds in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmhVNIR5Ppc
Louisiana also is in the process of
fighting for sex education in school (required for grades 4th
through 12th). This bill however was not passed, and it
is the third time it has been rejected in the past five years. The
main argument stated in this article is that the kids get enough
information from parents.
Most teachers are not certified to
teach sex education and neither are most parents. Should this
change??
Also, not sure how many of you know about
this, but there is a large committee dedicated to bringing
comprehensive sex ed to schools: SIECUS – Sexuality information and
education council of the United States. It is an interesting resource
to look at, and has a lot of current information about the sex ed
movement.
http://www.siecus.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewPage&pageID=1347&nodeID=1
-Nichele A.
-Nichele A.
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ReplyDeletePersonally, I think that this should change. When someone is not certified to teach a subject and the school administration allows them to do so, it gives the notion that the subject is not important enough for someone to be certified in it.
ReplyDeleteFrom my own experience, my physical education teacher also taught the health class, but he was not certified. In my opinion, the class was a total joke and no one took it seriously because it was "just the gym teacher." He had no real, in-class experience and put everything we needed to know for tests on the whiteboard where we copied it down and he didn't say a word.
If we truly want healthy sex to be more prominent in our society, we need to have individuals educated in the subject teaching the children in our schools. If that does not change, the sex education won't either.
I believe that there should be some brief training for teachers to be able to teach sex ed. This course does not have to be super long or crazy but just a brief course to make sure the teachers understand how to answer certain questions from students and so on. Just like you do not want someone teaching you about biology that does not have a degree in it, you do not want someone who does not know how to properly teach sex ed to young children. I can see how people do not think it is necessary because you learn about sex throughout your schooling and through experience but at the same time I think it would be very helpful and useful for the teachers to get a crash course about it before teaching it to children in grade school.
ReplyDelete"Most teachers are not certified to teach sex education and neither are most parents. Should this change??"
ReplyDeleteBecause there are many misconceptions around sexuality I believe the sex ed teachers should be certified. I believe that there is an opportunity to create programs that standardized developing a thick desire amongst all public schools. I believe that sexual education should be taught by certified people who know how to encourage healthy sexual expression and a power balance between genders. I believe that by addressing certification in the workplace, this will encourage parents to be more knowledgeable about free expression of sexuality and proper methods of protection.
I definitely think that those teaching sex ed should be certified, having some sort of sufficient training on the matter. If it is not a requirement, then there is a huge possibility that children will be receiving inaccurate and false information that could have dire consequences in the future. Especially with something so vital to a child's health and development, I do not believe that there is any room for mistake or misinformation.
ReplyDelete