Sex education at school: excesses, masturbation and pornography… The great fantasies surrounding the new program

While the school sex education program has been revised and is to be officially presented in December, criticism is already flying, with some associations expressing outrage at this teaching.

A new program for “education on emotional, relationship and sexual life” will be presented on December 5th to the Higher Education Council, for possible implementation at the start of the 2025 school year. With this revision, the National Education hopes to expand the number of students who benefit from this teaching, of which three sessions are compulsory per year. According to RMC, only 15% of French students have access to it today.

This teaching addresses important topics such as consent or the prevention of violence and sexually transmitted diseases. In its new version, it could target from the early kindergarten section a work on emotions and the names of private parts, then up to high school with for older adolescents the questioning on the differences between “excitement, feeling, desire and pleasure”.

This teaching is a subject of debate and stirs up certain fears within the most conservative associations. As the presentation of the new program approaches, the Family Union, Sos-Education and Parents Vigilants are stepping up to the plate. Ludovine de La Rochère, the very traditionalist and activist president of the Family Union, deplores “gender ideology” and “woke influence” which she considers very present in the current version of these sessions, reports Le Monde.

For his part, the media-friendly Maurice Berger, a child psychiatrist who has published a book on sex education at the school with the director of Sos-Education – a very conservative right-wing association of Catholic inspiration – considers that this teaching is not adapted to children, as he declared on Europe 1, without contradictory words. “We have to wait until a child asks questions to answer them,” he said. For the latter, it is, for example, problematic that the difference between heterosexual and homosexual families is mentioned before the age of 4. He fears that many slip-ups have taken place during these lessons, particularly with the mention of subjects such as “sodomy” or “fellatio”. Some parents are also very suspicious because many see “their children as asexual angels,” explained psychiatrist Serge Hefez to RMC, in an attempt to understand these fears.

Courses adapted to the children's ages

What is really taught in these classes? ? Maryse Boyer, founder of the iKi iKi association, which provides sex education sessions at school, assured Huffpost that the classes are completely adapted to the children's ages. “One of the most persistent rumors is that children are taught to masturbate. This is, of course, completely false: “at no time is this subject discussed with children, whether they are in elementary school or middle school,” she said.

She explains that the concepts surrounding the body, intimacy and sexuality are gradually deepened as children and adolescents grow up. The topics surrounding violence, gender equality, harassment and discrimination are explored further from the end of primary school, for example. And with tact. No education on sexuality per se before middle school. The draft programs indicate that sexuality “requires a degree of maturity” and responsibility for which it is a question of preparing the students, very gradually and respecting their pace of development.

“With the youngest children, in kindergarten, we first talk about emotions and we learn to name the parts of the body”, Maryse Boyer tells Huffpost, who further specifies: with 3-6 year olds, we explain with appropriate words what love, friendship, family are, we respond to their little children's questions. We approach the notion of secrets: knowing what they are, and making children understand that there are nice secrets and that there are others that are bad. This allows us to approach consent in very practical situations. For example, are we obliged to kiss a family member? ? Do I have the right to impose a hug on a friend or a friend ?"

The National Union of Teachers also supports the progress of the program, saying that students are not exposed to inappropriate content. On the contrary, according to the union, the goal is to “deconstruct these impacts and offer other, less standardized, more egalitarian and non-violent representations of sexuality” than what can be seen in pornography today, easily accessible online, and which creates trauma for the youngest.

While the program is also criticized for an explanation of gender considered premature, the SNUipp specifies that it is above all a question of going against girl-boy stereotypes and reducing inequalities. “Gender theory” is a “scarecrow” regularly waved by transphobic, sexist and far-right movements. At school, there is no question of blurring children's identities, nor of course of encouraging them to change sex.”, recalls the union, which gives concrete examples: “This involves, for example, not reserving certain games for girls, not prohibiting boys from expressing their feelings or thinking about occupying the playground.”