Monique Fouilloux, education coordinator for Education International, with additional contributions from Nathalie Barboza (UNESCO Dakar); Babacar Fall, coordinator of the Group for Research and Development on Population and Education, Dakar (Senegal); Asa Andersson-Singh, formerly a programme specialist with the UNESCO office in New Delhi (India).
In Senegal children find out about Aids from primary school textbooks.
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Dame la fuerza y la voluntad de ampliar mis conocimientos. Aleja de mí la idea de que todo lo puedo. Maimónides, |
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UNESCO and Aids education Set up in 1987, UNESCO’s Section for Preventive Education aims to develop
responsible attitudes and behaviour at individual and community levels using educational
strategies. The goal is to enhance national capacities to implement effective educational
programmes. This can mean implementing pilot projects, providing expertise, and organizing
conferences and teacher training workshops. It assists in launching international
campaigns aimed at youth in collaboration with civil society, promoting peer education,
creative teaching and publishing guides for teachers and educational materials. |
School is
an ideal place to make young people aware of the danger of Aids. But the topic is
delicate and all the harder to handle with precious few resources
Educating
schoolchildren about Aids is something very recent in developing countries–when it
happens at all. Many politicians, school principals and teachers are trapped by sexual
taboos and believe Aids education encourages young people to have sex. Only in 1997
did a report by UNAIDS (entitled Effects of sex education
on young people’s sexual behaviour) come out showing there was no such danger at
all.
The situation is finally beginning to change. Many developing countries have now
taken the plunge and Aids education is part of their school curricula. Sometimes,
subterfuges have to be used. Indonesia, a Muslim country, has chosen to talk about
“reproductive health education” instead of sex education. Many countries have followed
suit.
Senegal’s
pioneering programmes
In West and Central
Africa, the subject is tackled in “family life and population education” programmes
which offer a multi-disciplinary mix of biology, home economics and health, civic
and moral education. However, difficulties lie not just in devising programmes but
also in teaching them effectively. In most countries, the programmes have not yet
been endorsed by the government.
Senegal is a pioneer in the field and family education is even taught in primary
schools there. Since 1994, a Senegalese NGO, Group for Research and Development on
Population and Education (GEEP) has set up 140 family education clubs,
involving 52 per cent of the country’s secondary schools. In 1997, three such clubs
were started at Dakar University.
So far more than 2,000 pupils, a third of them girls, have completed training as
group leaders. Their job is to make their fellow students, as well as young people
not in school, aware of Aids through cultural days, fairs and holiday camp activities.
Teachers help them by looking after administrative matters. During the 1997-98 school
year, their work involved about 45,000 young people, representing 32 per cent of
all secondary school students.
In Asia, the situation varies widely from country to country. Thailand, Cambodia,
Laos, Viet Nam and Sri Lanka have well-established prevention programmes which are
part of formal education, while Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Maldives are
only just getting started. In India, an Aids awareness campaign is supposed to be
part of physical education and courses in “social useful productive work”. But often
teachers do not even know such programmes exist, so they have to make do by themselves.
In the most remote parts of India and elsewhere, teachers with little knowledge of
Aids are expected to initiate an open discussion about sexuality with classes of
50 to 80 pupils without the help of books on the subject. This is asking too much.
Teachers:
overcoming their own inhibitions
“One of my students
asked me a question about Aids which I just didn’t know how to answer, so I said
it wasn’t the subject we were dealing with,” admitted a history teacher in Africa
during a seminar in Lomé (Togo) in April 1999. “But I had the feeling it was
the first time the child had dared to ask the question and I fear he won’t dare ask
it again.”
The teachers, themselves inhibited, do not know how to tackle the subject. In West
Africa, only Guinea has arranged for Aids education at the National Teachers’ College,
while Burkina Faso and Togo are focusing on secondary school teachers. The other
countries have made little headway.
Teachers also need to have access to interactive teaching methods so they can create
an atmosphere of confidence to encourage young people to voice their concerns and
learn to protect themselves. But teaching materials are seriously lacking. At the
beginning of the 1990s, Unesco and the World Health Organization (WHO) published
some manuals for school curriculum planners suggesting activities for pupils and
how teachers might approach the subject (see box). Several thousand of these well-produced
guides were printed, but there are 55 million teachers in the world. More recently,
Togo put out a brochure for schoolchildren, but it was distributed only privately.
Reach
children when they’re young
Even when appropriate
tools are available, teachers do not always make use of them. Experience shows that
young teachers, who adapt much more easily to new approaches, are the ones to rely
on. As a rule, nobody is really prepared to talk to young people about sex. Parents
do not feel up to the job and pass it on to the teachers who in turn pass it back
to the family or the church. This is especially so in majority-Catholic countries,
mainly in Latin America, where condoms are still sometimes regarded as “an instrument
of the devil.” Surveys by UNAIDS show that when young people are well-informed about
the disease, they protect themselves more effectively than adults. In Chile, Brazil
and Mexico, boys between 15 and 18 are the most frequent users of condoms.
But education authorities still balk at prevention programmes and do not like to
recognize that young people are sexually active. Even though premarital sex is frowned
upon, it is common among teenagers, who change partners more often than adults. This
is why about half the new cases of infection are found among people between 15 and
24. So they must be warned about Aids as early as possible.
The ideal age to start preventive education is about seven, according to experts.
Children of that age do not have inhibitions, express themselves openly at school
and freely pass on what they learn to the rest of their family and are thus excellent
agents of communication. It is too late to begin introducing this education in secondary
school because between a quarter and a half of all schoolchildren in developing countries
drop out of school after five years. Programmes outside school are therefore vital
to combat Aids. There are some, but not enough programmes, which mainly reach children
in big towns.
So there is a great deal of work to be done. But people are clearly becoming aware
of the problem. After two decades of silence, the issue of Aids has finally reached
the horizon of the classroom.
