RECENTLY there has been a significant move among Chinese educators to provide better sex education to students in college, primary schools and even kindergartens.

The Ministry of Education recently issued a circular requiring colleges to make courses on reproductive physiology and sex psychology part of the standard curriculum.

This kind of education as a rule is included in courses known as physiology and hygiene in middle schools, but in actual practice some more sensitive topics are either not addressed or glossed over by instructors who consider them embarrassing and not essential.

In the past, this kind of information about sexuality was generally passed on informally outside the schools, by young people.

One of the many stated reasons for offering formal, medically accurate instruction is to protect children from sex abuse, and to prevent teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Given the Ministry of Education mandate, the overwhelming response has been enthusiastic.

In Guangxi Financial College, professor Ai Jun even went beyond the basics to illuminate students about topics such as sex perversion, sexual satisfaction and the details of sexual intercourse.

His class is so popular that it has been oversubscribed in the college in Nanning in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Han Qunying, an anatomist-turned-sex instructor in Nanjing Medical University, deplored that "it is too late to make up for sex education in universities. It should start with the three-year-olds."

According to Freud, children at around age three began to evince curiosity about sex, body parts and where babies come from.

Although as yet we have no reports about actual sexual initiation for three year olds, the wave of enlightenment has already benefited some third graders ("Primary sex textbook launched," October 25, Shanghai Daily.)

A kindergarten in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, started to sex up its curriculum for preschool toddlers as early as 2008. It used anatomically correct dolls to explain the reproductive process and teachers would join pupils in a game dramatizing how a sperm manages to track down and fertilize an egg.

These dolls are said to be more explicit than primary school textbooks currently in trial use in Beijing and Shanghai.

Some parents are worried that such unusually early introduction of human sexuality and reproduction might arouse children's interest in having sex at too early an age.

Psychologist Xun Yufeng said that sex education, while necessary, should be in sync with children's psychological development, and should proceed gradually, and be handled with delicacy.

"Sex education is not the same as an encyclopedic and thorough grasp of knowledge about sexuality,"

But China's pioneering sex educators are learning from the "advanced experience" of the West.

It is reported that in the United Kingdom, sex education is required for children above the age of five. One UK kindergarten textbook is said to contain an illustration of a naked couple in bed, with detailed explanation of the situation.

Moral values

In some schools in the United States, condoms can be distributed to senior high school students.

There is a veritable "Great Leap Forward" in this pervasive thirst for reproductive knowledge.

Commenting on the current handling of sex education in colleges, professor Qian Xun said that a major problem with such education is that "it concerns only physiology and science, but is totally devoid of any moral and cultural deliberations."

Qian is son of renowned classical scholar Chien Mu.

"In sex education, the most important thing is not to teach how to use contraceptives, but to help arm students with correct moral values," Qian observed at a recent lecture in Chongqing Municipality.

In other words, correct sex education has less to do with science (know-how) than ethics.

The prevailing perception of Western practice as "advanced" is misguided, because sex is practiced much earlier in some countries, just as promiscuity is more tolerated in some cultures.

For example, in one Western country where there are "non-judgmental adolescent pregnancy counseling," and subsidies and support for single young mothers, a survey finds that more than one-quarter of year 10 (high school sophomores) students and just over half of all year 12 (seniors) have had sexual intercourse.

How to handle sex issues is culture specific, and although premature loss of virginity is no longer reason to be stigmatized or ostracized, modesty in matters of sex is still central to Chinese perception of womanly virtues.

Our ancestors believed such modesty is best protected by ignorance.

Biological clock

In the past in some areas of China, among the dowry gifts from a mother to her bride-to-be daughter was a "trunk bottom," containing a figure of a couple engaged in coitus.

Experience shows that such delayed revelation, too late by modern standards, apparently did the opposite of detracting from nuptial bliss.

It can be easily observed that, with rare exceptions, traditional Chinese matrimonial alliances last much longer than modern marriages.

As a matter of fact, in some less progressive parts of China, divorce is still rare.

Ironically, in an age when pornography is only a few clicks away, and when some television stations seem to be working overtime to coach us in skills of courtship, dalliance, and flirtation, and when artistic or real scenes of sexual situations are daily imposed on us, our educators are worried not about our children's overexposure, but about their awkward innocence.

The widely cited excuse for "self-protection" is untenable.

When sex knowledge is divulged outside of a moral and cultural context, it naturally invites experimentation, not just among the more impressionable and enterprising children and young people, but among adults as well.

So, it can be imagined that in the wake of this sex education "Great Leap Forward," education authorities should next mull coaching girl students how to deflect the advances of their male peers.

Be reminded: We are biologically timed to "wake up" in response to our mental and physical maturity.

The eagerness to introduce our children to sexuality is yet another sign of the decay of society's moral fiber.

In devoting so much of their energy to the sex issue, our educators have again betrayed their own lack of education.