The Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) has questioned the basis for the introduction of Comprehensive Sexual Education (CSE) by the Ghana Education Service (GES).
Reports of the purported content of the programme have been met with mixed reactions.
Some critics felt the CSE was an attempt to push an LGBT agenda into the country’s education system.
The National Chairman for GNECC, Kofi Asare, speaking on Citi TV’s Breakfast Daily sought to find out the empirical basis for the move.
“What research was conducted to show that the increasing rate of teenage pregnancy is occasioned by girls not having full knowledge of their sexual and reproductive rights i.e. not knowing how to use contraceptives? The question is that is that how you want to train our girls at the Junior High School levels, how to learn to use contraceptives?”
He further stated that anything that did not have the potential to be strengthened at home should not be taught in school, as the home provides the beginning of socialization.
“I think that education prepares the child for the future and it should provide the holistic development of the child. What education seeks to achieve in the classroom must always be reinforced at the household level i.e. the home, church, mosque or any other environment outside the school, bearing in mind that the child spends more time at home than in school. Anything that is taught at school must have the potential of being reinforced at home other than that, it would not succeed,” he said.
The National Chairman of GNECC is not the only individual who has reacted negatively to the decision of introducing CSE into the curriculum.
A ranking member of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education Peter Nortsu Kotoe described the implementation of CSE as unnecessary and should be withdrawn. According to him, its contents are already being taught as part of RME and Social Studies, thereby serving as a repetition of the already existing curriculum.
A number of religious bodies have also kicked against the introduction of the subject, claiming it goes against the religious and cultural values of Ghanaians.
