The Varsitarian

THE FIRST thing to be said about the integration of sex education by the Department of Education’s Memorandum No. 26 in the curriculum from Grade 5 to senior high school is that it is overkill: the subject will be integrated in Science, Edukasyong Pantahanan at Pangkabuhayan (EPP), Health, Heograpiya, Kasaysayan, at Sibika, and Mathematics. The subject may as well be called Sex in Excess.

It is quite galling that at a time when Filipino students – going by world comparative scores in basic literacy and math skills – are just a step removed from cretins, the DepEd wishes to further burden them with a subject on the more titillating aspects about the birds and the bees beyond basic biology where their scores are similarly appalling.

The second thing to be said about it is that it’s unconstitutional. The Constitution upholds the rights of parents to be responsible for the development of the moral behavior of their children. At the least, the DepEd didn’t consult parents about its initiative and discarded subsidiarity which soundly leaves to the parents an area where they have the better competence—moral formation especially about sexual matters.

Of course, everyone knows why the DepEd and other agencies would like to get in on the sexual act of minors. It is because of the money. If they don’t introduce curricular innovations and, in the case of Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral, come up with outlandish campaigns like condom-distribution, they will not be able to justify asking for a bigger budget

The subject is called “Adolescent Reproductive Health.” Obviously, this was the sex education subject that was being proposed in the Reproductive Health bill that failed to pass in the last Congress, since it was hardly a health, but a birth-control, measure. When it failed to pass muster, Cabral, like DepEd Secretary Mona Valino, a careerist who has been on government payroll since time immemorial and who has to come up with just about every project to keep taxpayer’s money coming to the DOH and pay her payroll, went ballistic and distributed condoms—funded by taxpayer’s money—at the Dangwa flower market in Sampaloc, Manila last Valentine’s Day ostensibly to stem the rise of HIV-Aids and sexually transmitted diseases.

Who was she fooling? There’s no HIV-Aids epidemic in the Philippines: as epidemiologists who are not being quoted by the media would tell you—4,000 HIV-Aids cases out of a population of 89 million do not an epidemic make. (In contrast, the media and the World Health Organization say that condom-happy Thailand’s HIV-Aids situation —half a million HIV-Aids cases and half a million dead —is under control!) But for Cabral and her overwrought imagination, that middling statistics are enough to scare the wits out of everyone, enough for her to spend taxpayer’s money on harebrained schemes like calling for an Aids summit and justify her relevance and her payroll.

Valisno is stirring the same panic to justify sex education. But she betrayed her real intention when she absurdly connected HIV-Aids with population control: she said she would push for full implementation of Memorandum 26 “because the country needs it, and the country’s prevention [of HIV] will just be put to waste if the population continues to grow at an outstanding rate.” Ergo, Adolescent Reproductive Health is an excuse to implement birth control. We credit her at least for her candor.

The growing population has always been the scapegoat for the nation’s poverty and illiteracy. Going by the logic of Valisno, the high dropout rate should also be blamed on it. Of course, she and Cabral are not expected to see the moat in their eyes since one reason for the country’s poverty is the size of government and its corruption and mismanagement. With too many bureaucrats and careerists on the payroll, there would never be enough for the poor. Worse, the poor themselves are blamed for their poverty! They’re perceived as rabbits with voracious sex habits and rampaging populations! Valisno and Cabral perhaps should go back to school and learn lessons from Nobel economists like Simon Kuznets, who denies any negative correlation between population and economic growth, and Amartya Sen, who urges that money spent for birth control be used instead for poverty amelioration.

Valisno and Cabral should at least appreciate the principle of subsidiarity. Things are better left discussed where people are more knowledgeable and more experienced than adolescents are – the home and the family. Parents are the ones who should guide their children in growing up as responsible, sexually healthy, and morally sound persons. It is in the home where basic education begins. While sex may be a queasy topic for both parents and children, the cardinal rule still applies: parents know what is best for their children.