Sex education in the eyes of primary school teachers in Novo Hamburgo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Sex education has been included in the National Curriculum of the Brazilian Ministry of Education since 1996 as a cross-cutting theme that should be linked to the contents of each school subject in primary and high schools. This paper presents a study of the implementation of this policy in the primary schools of Novo Hamburgo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, based on interviews between January 2011 and April 2012 with 82 teachers working in those schools. We found that sex education was not being taught as a cross-cutting theme in any of the schools, and that any lessons were mostly dominated by a biomedical discourse focusing primarily on the reproductive organs, fertility, pregnancy, and contraception. Sexual health and relationships and non-heterosexual sex and relationships were being neglected. Sex education was also considered a possible means of correcting or controlling sexual identities and behaviours deemed abnormal or immoral. We recommend far more discussion of how to implement the National Curriculum recommendations. We call for education courses to provide theoretical and methodological training on sex education for teachers, and recommend that the boards of educational institutions take up sex education as a priority subject. Lastly, we suggest that each school studies local sexuality-related problems and based on the findings, each teacher presents a pedagogical proposal of how to integrate sex education into the subjects they teach.