Sexual education in our elementary schools is going to become a voluntary subject, therefore no one is going to attend it ever again. Yay! (attention: following post is full of bias.)

Actually, I think it basically means 'it's up to parents if they do or don't want their kid to go to sexual education lessons,' nevertheless, THOSE are usually kids that want it the most. The Vocal Minority (from now on referred to as 'Parents') in Czech Republic apparently decided that they don't want their kids to be exposed to such atrocities as people being born in womb, birth control and sexually transferred diseases, probably so they can tell them that kids get made by kissing and leave it at that so they don't have to worry about their poor daughter's personal life and can make her study more.

What? I always believed Czech society to be surprisingly enlightened one, but this is pure bullshit. If it weren't for sexual education, I wouldn't know a thing about sex, and I found it lacking anyway when I looked at it from retrospective. As I have gathered, it should have been expanded and more educational, but wave of repulsion from 'Parents' made our school ministry come up with the voluntary scheme, that will, of course, cut all the kids that actually NEED that information from obtaining it. I DO believe they'll get to know from their friends, but that doesn't mean it's any less dumb to do that.

To close the post, this is in order. I mean, that would TOTALLY be their reaction.

In the US, students have to bring back a signed form in order to attend. If they don't, then they get some sort of alternative assignment for that time.

It seems like we had it in late elementary school, then again in middle school and lastly in High School.

That is precisely the reason why I was so proud of our educational system to have something like this included in essential education.

I don't disagree, I just think that it's hardly the end of the world.

In this context doing something like an American is definitely a slap in the face for any group that has morals.

I haven't taken sex ed since middle school. when the district wanted to put it in they had this big "meeting" at the high school where the parents just basically bitched ( I live in a very conservative town lol). And do you wanna know what we ended up getting for sex ed. I shit you not it was a bunch of diagrams and looking up words like penis on a crossword/wordsearch. Kinda sad looking back on it.

I can only sign your text. And you can and one more facepalm to this.
I wonder what problems some people have with it. Even my mother, usually reasonable person is against it and I can't figure her reasons at all. She says parents should themselves decide what to teach their children. But can't it be applied to all subjects taught in school? If they want to teach ttheir kids themselves they can do it at home.
I envy you for even having it though at our backward school we wouldn't even imagine being taught such things.

In France, there is NO sex education in school. The topic is dealt of in Biology class and that's all.

I used to think this should be a parent's decision, and maybe through elementary school it should be, little harm will usually come from it (except kids may not know when they're being sexually abused).

However it becomes a social problem later on, with teen pregnancies costing society money and spread of VD/STD/STI (whatever the term you know is, they all mean the same thing). In my state it's including in Health in Junior High and High School, which is required and unlikely to be cut. I think requiring it after about age 10 is a state's right (state in the general sense of a government), even over parent objections. In France it seemed you all found out in a more hands on way, so to speak. At least everyone I met over there had a story like that:)

We got loads of pictures of diseased genitalia. To this day I have a hard time imagining the sexual organs as being anything other than extraordinary disgusting.

It works both ways, and this is definitely not a very conservative town.

Plus, the sex ed class answered absolutely none of the questions that were relevant to the GLBT community, which means that coming out of sex ed I had some education when it comes to the opposite sex, but absolutely none for dealing with boyfriends.

While I didn't have a traditional sex ed course, we had a health teacher in middle school (6th grade) give us 2 days worth of class on sex. Really was just a lecture, no homework or anything. This was in New Jersey also.

When I went to high school in Oregon (Freshman in 1998) sex ed was lumped in with Health classes, which were a requirement for graduation.

Yeah, nothing like scare 'em straight tactics! I hate that stuff. Worst case pictures of HPV infections are scary, if not very common. I forget where but I ran across a research hospital's chart of sexual transmission rates for each sexual activity and disease. It was interesting and showed a lot of that horrible stuff is basically bunk. While it's pretty easy to transfer the clap via oral, for example, HIV is nearly impossible to transmit that way as is HPV, iirc.

If it makes you feel any better, university health classes are completely optional and have much worse pictures you get to look at.

What I'm waiting for is somebody who was sexually abused to sue the school district for harming them. I'm sure for people that have a largely healthy view of sex that it's not as big an issue, but for those who have been raped or molested, that can't be good.

In grade four (I guess I was 9), one day we just walked in and bam, a vagina and penis were drawn in marker on two pieces of paper and the teacher is saying she'll talk about about each over two days. I was in french immersion so it would be in french. She said anyone who wish not to hear it go out in the hall. So I went out in the hall with a few others probably due to some parental brainwashing on how it's evil.

See, we had this awesome school bus driver who would stop the bus if ahead of schedule, pop in a cassette and everyone would start dancing on the bus. Anyway, one of the kids always brought a mix tape with her favorite song "Lets Talk About Sex" by salt n peppa. So I would hum about that at home having no idea what it meant. One day my father heard me and gave some lecture on how sex was an evil bug or something.

But when shown stuff again in grade six, it was no big deal. What was kind of funny is that they showed a video about it where kindergarten students are asking why the man must "join" with the woman using as literal terms as possible.

All the real important stuff was covered quite nicely in grade 7 and then in biology class in 8. The biology test involved you memorizing every part of the man and woman's genitals and various sexual related questions. I do believe I ended up acing that exam.

The bottom line, some sort of logical sex ed class should definitely be taught early on. Screaming abstinence with no context or as a hardline way to go through teenage years is unrealistic and on makes things worse.

Nah we didn't get diagrams of diseased genitals it was just normal looking genitals in the diagrams. the class was still useless.

Sex education is irrelevant, as otherwise we'd be unable to breed.

Troy McLure put it best with his sex ed video when he said: "Kids, now you know how to do it - don't".

There is no need for sex education classes from a perspective of teaching us to have sex, we can work that out!

So the benefit of the classes are around STIs (I was tought they were called STDs by my now not so modern education). So it really boils down to a statement of "Wear a F*&C&!NG Condom". We had a lot of good adverts for that, till John Pattern.

So Sex ed, if they are not just ramming the idea of safe sex at you (no jokes please), is simply an excuse to enforce other values. That's not sex ed, that's sunday school.