School reform in Nepal raises health education concerns

For theses girls in Kathmandu, Nepal, and other young adults around the world, adequate health education is crucial to making the right choices. (Photo credit: Creative Commons)

During the recent United Nations Summit on HIV/AIDS, the Minister of State for Health and Population of Nepal, Dharma Shila Chapagi, announced, “Prevention is better than cure. Hence, prevention must constitute the cornerstone of the global HIV and AIDS response.”

This statement comes at a time when schools in Nepal will undergo a reform that would divide and merge the subject that includes sexual reproductive health education with other courses. This begs the question of whether children and adolescents, who constitute one-third of the population, will be able to get the best education possible to take the correct preventative measures in a country where 63,000 people are currently infected with HIV/AIDS.

“I do not think it will directly affect gaining knowledge,” Medin Lamichhane, principal of the progressive Ullens School in Kathmandu, told MediaGlobal News. “We can see a lot of redundancy in curriculum. So in fact, it will give teachers more time to focus on content and go in-depth about the topic.”

The move would split the Environment, Population, and Health (EPH) subject, merging the population content with social studies and the environment and health portions with science and physical education.

But one of the main problems affecting the sex education curriculum of Nepal has been the unsatisfactory teaching of its content. UNESCO reported that in some instances, teachers rely on having students memorize material from textbooks. The Family Planning Association of Nepal (FPAN) recently stated that teachers have not received proper training or reference materials in order to sufficiently teach sexual reproductive health.

A 2002 study by the organization Reproductive Health Matters revealed that students and teachers feel uncomfortable discussing the subject in-depth. There are fears that eradicating the label of a “health” class would further deteriorate the quality of sexual reproductive health-education, though the content would still be present.

“This merging of subjects does not yield better results,” said Gaj Gurung, a representative of Nepal YouthLEAD and a program officer at the National Federation of Women Living with HIV.

“EPH as a separate subject with a separate teacher was not able to comply with the needs and delivery of sexual reproductive health (SRH), and merging would make SRH a small component of science, which becomes overshadowed. Science is quite an intense subject in Nepal, so mugging up reproductive organs of male and female does not produce a better understanding.”

There is also the issue of addressing sex education not only in scientific terms, but in socio-cultural ones as well. Many issues are not discussed between youths and their teachers and parents in Nepal.

“To understand HIV one has to go beyond science,” says Gurung. “Looking at the ‘what’ concept, like the modes of transmission of HIV, does not prevent HIV. But the need to analyze the ‘why’ concept, which explains why intravenous drug users shared needles, why a sex worker did not use condoms, why youths could not access the available services, is something which science cannot explain.”

Sexual health and prevention education is especially crucial in this day and age when children and adolescents often seek information from the internet and the media instead of risking what may be an awkward conversation with a parent or teacher.

“Young people in Nepal are severely ill-informed about sex and sexuality,” Som Paneru, executive director of the Nepal Youth Foundation in Kathmandu and President of the Ullens Education Foundation Nepal, toldMediaGlobal News.

“Because the parents and teachers both failed in delivering correct information in sexuality to their children and students, the teenagers have no choice but to believe all sorts of misleading information and myths about sex coming from media, including [the] internet. The generation gap between the parents and their children is so wide that parents have no idea what their teenaged children are going through.”

The Family Planning Association of Nepal is working on advocating a Comprehensive Sexuality Education Project, according to its 2010 annual report. The group plans on issuing a reference manual about sexual reproductive health education for all teachers of Environment, Health, and Population.

The project would also involve partnering with the Ministry of Education in order to train teachers effectively in sexual reproductive health education and encourage students to take an active participation in it.

There was no explanation, however, on how the manual would be implemented in light of the school reform program.