By MARTIN JOHNSTON
Senior schoolgirls taught the health curriculum from a kit containing deliberately absurd questions about sexuality gave it high praise, a teacher says.
"It was extremely well received," said Melissa Fenton, the head of health and life-skills education at St Margaret's College in Christchurch.
She tried out the new kit with about 80 sixth formers this year and intends continuing with it next year.
The value of the 182-page teaching resource, produced by the Christchurch College of Education and financed by the Health Funding Authority, has been questioned by Catholic groups, the Christian Heritage Party and Avondale College acting principal Warren Peat.
Designed for use by senior pupils taking non-compulsory health courses, it contains questions designed to provoke debate about sexuality, such as:
"The majority of child molesters are heterosexuals. Do you consider it safe to expose children to heterosexual teachers, Scout leaders, coaches, etc?"
Ms Fenton said those questions were quickly picked up by her pupils as assumptions commonly made about homosexuals but twisted around to apply to heterosexuals.
"It just opens their eyes to see ... I don't push anything on to the girls. It's about providing them with information they can interact with. They can make up their own minds ... "
All senior pupils at St Margaret's, an Anglican girls school, took the life-skills course, which covered health, careers and religious education. The subject required two periods a week in the sixth form and one a week in the seventh.
Most who used the resource had spent eight to 10 periods working with it.
There had been no opposition to it, even from parents.
The Catholic Education Office chief executive, Brother Pat Lynch, said he did not object to the Health Funding Authority paying for the kit, but it should finance a broader range of school resources on sex education, especially ones which promoted sexual abstinence for young people.
He said the questions highlighted in the Herald from the College of Education resource were "naive."
"Most young people, once they get to 18, have got a reasonably balanced view of the areas that [the kit's authors] are talking about in relation to homosexuality."
School quiz targets sex bias
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