The Chinese Way

Apparently a Chinese college has just started the nation's first college sex ed course (according to an article in the state news agency, of all places.)

The interesting part comes halfway through, when the professor who teaches the class says,

"I hope to make students aware that differences in culture are an important reason we have different attitudes toward marriage. That's why many marriages between Chinese and foreigners fail in the end."

On second read, it actually doesn't seem like the author is trying to abduct students into a vast, government-sponsored Chinese hive mind. In case, like me, you wondered.

But as liberals - including those in India - push for more comprehensive sex ed in schools, I remember the uncomfortable feeling of being indoctrinated I got in my own college sex ed class.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have taken the class. One of the Chinese students interviewed for the article says that his motivation is to figure out how to get a mate. Which is more personal than academic. The blurry line between personality and polemic is the potential downfall of this genre.

The professor who taught my class was famous - perhaps infamous is the better word - because a few years before I came to college, he'd been the subject of an exhaustive ethics investigation. They cleared him, but that didn't keep him from using his lectern as a platform from which to preach his own personal views, thinly disguised as scholarship.

If his goal was to make us uncomfortable, he often succeeded. But if his goal was to make us understand the complexity of the subject, then he failed. (This isn't his fault - he called in outside speakers and everything. But those speakers inevitably toed his party line.) See, my professor had done research and come out with some very controversial findings. How did I learn that his findings were controversial? From Wikipedia. Not from him, because he never bothered to present any other point of view besides his own.

And maybe he really didn't believe there was another point of view, because his own personal experience - which informed his work - was so compelling to him. I don't know if sex education is particularly prone to this objectivity lapse, but those who audit these courses must be aware of it.

Obviously, the solution is not to shut down all human sex courses. But if a college plans to offer a "human sexuality" course (billed as such), then administrators must understand that A) sex classes will draw a huge audience, not all of whom are there because they want to become sexologists B) there is a multitude of research on the subject that is often contradictory C) the audience is at a critical age and D) it is a culturally sensitive subject.

I realize that you'll never please everybody, and people will take these classes who probably shouldn't (like me). But on the other hand, there is a certain bar for scholarship. Just because the subject is sex doesn't mean the bar should be lower. If my development economics professor had taught us about neoliberal economic policy without talking about how often the policy failed on the ground, we would consider that irresonsible.

For all these reasons, sex ed classes must be more carefully monitored and audited than others, and there should be an attempt to cover the material thorougly. (For example, my class should really have been called, "Sexual disorders" but that wouldn't have drawn nearly the same audience)

(I realize college level sex ed is a different animal from school-level sex ed, particularly the health/hygiene/mechanics type of education that one gets in the better public schools on the East and West Coasts.)