Sex education is essential, says AMLO

Sex education is essential, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) said at his morning press conference on Thursday when asked about the content of the new education reform.

“Regarding sex education, I believe it's necessary, it's indispensable, it shouldn't be omitted, and we should provide information to adolescents and, if necessary, to children. We need scientific training in this regard.”

He said sex education should be rational and grounded in knowledge and science, without mixing it with matters of faith or dogma.

“That's my point of view, and it's up to the experts, the educators.”

Asked whether teachers could receive training to provide sex education, President López Obrador said it was already included in teacher-training college curricula and would only need to be reinforced or reviewed in teacher education programs.

Among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, Mexico ranks first in teenage pregnancy, and young people may also be at greater risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections.

As a result of the educational reform approved during Enrique Peña Nieto's six-year term, free textbooks were published that teach the definitions of homosexuality (attraction to people of the same gender), bisexuality (attraction to people of both genders), and how gender is socially constructed and how it is not necessarily the way people identify.

On the content arising from the new education reform, AMLO said educators, rather than self-styled experts, would determine what children learn in school. He said Mexico has excellent educators who would be free to develop those programs and would be invited to do so.

“We must strive to strengthen civics, ethics, history, everything that was set aside during the neoliberal period. It must be a humanistic education, with that common core. And of course, advanced in science, in the natural sciences, in mathematics, but with a foundation in humanism, not neglecting that.”

He reiterated that during the neoliberal period, there was an attempt to erase history, and that's a contradiction, because if you don't know where you come from, you don't know where you're going.

Noticieros Televisa, April 25, 2019