The sorry state of our school’s health classes

Letter to the Editor

I’m sure most people would agree that school curriculum of all kinds should be regularly updated. A person in high school now should not be learning the exact same things in the exact same way that their parents did. Unfortunately that is exactly what is happening with our health class curriculum. Health is arguably the subject that has changed the most in the past 50 years which begs the question: why have many of our current health textbooks been unchanged since the 80s?

Of course, puberty and the birds and the bees are the same as they’ve always been, but these books’ claims about things like same sex attraction, cannabis and healthy relationships in the age of the internet can be wildly outdated to the modern eye, not to mention the fact that these textbooks are often missing pages, ripped up, or generally look like they are about to crumble in your hands.

As for sexual education, you may as well forget it. Parents, if you think your child has been taught all they need to know in school, you are sorely mistaken. In all my years of middle school health class, there was exactly an hour and a half dedicated to sex ed. On almost the very last day of 9th grade they took two periods to have a lady from Planned Parenthood read out a PowerPoint presentation. When she learned of the fact that her little presentation was to be the entirety of our “human sexuality” unit, she was quite notably concerned, a reaction that should be shared by every parent who doesn’t want to deal with STDs or teen pregnancy.

Additionally, while content about puberty and the functioning of the reproductive organs is abundant, it did not even remotely prepare me or my peers for the realities of puberty. It was honestly more biology class than health class, diagrams of the reproductive organs and dry explanations of how they work but no real talk of how the changes happening to them would actually affect us.

The youth of our province are not prepared for how to have healthy sexual relationships; they do not have a good grasp of the functioning of their own bodies and overall have a completely inadequate ability to manage every aspect of their health, and that’s a problem that should concern everyone.

Eleanor Murray,

High School Student, St. John’s