Certainly, no sex education..

NEW DELHI: Dinanath Batra, head of Shiksha Bachao Samiti Andolan and an RSS ideologue, made another controversial remark in a series of many when he said that there is no need for sex education in schools.

"Certainly, no sex education... There is no need to teach about the reproductive system to the children till the age 19. They can learn about it when they are about to get married. Instead their super energy should be channelized to other things," said 85 year old retired teacher in an interview given to Sunday Standard’s Jan 11 issue.

“There is no need to teach about reproductive system to the children till the age 19. They can learn about it when they are about to get married. Instead their super energy should be channelized to other channels”, he advised.

Later, he said that their core curriculum, which they are in the process of designing, will include physical exercises like practising celibacy.

Showing his disdain for the Indian education system which was, “devised by the followers of Marx and Macaulay”, Batra advocated a new version which will be based on the “cultural and nationalist values”.

Batra catapulted himself into the headlines when he won a long legal battle in getting ‘The Hindus: An Alternative History’ banned in the country, a book by academic Wendy Doniger, a professor in History of religion. Penguin India, publisher of the book, pulped all its copies after the verdict came.

In a country which is already embedded in conservatism, and because of which, academics and individuals from civil society in spite of advocating sex education in schools for a long time had barely moved an inch forward, for them this remark proves to be regressive step in the opposite direction.

This movement against educating the young minds about the crucial stages of biological reproduction and their social aspects is nothing new.

Earlier also, the then Union Health minister, Harshavardhan, had made a like remark that sex education should be banned in schools.

This two-pronged strategy of ‘practising celibacy’ and scuppering of sex education which has emerged from the RSS thinktank, portends a familiar trend which is in the process of jettisoning an entire generation to the dark ages, where there used to be a wholly different definition of the concept of ‘what maketh a man’.

An ancient nation which took more than 2000 years to evolve from times of sati pratha to the time when it was abolished , chiefly because of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a true liberator and a champion of modern education along with Macauley, the custodian of our education system currently not only seem to fritter away what is hard won but, seem to replace it with ignorance in the garb of ancient wisdom.