| dc.description.abstract | Since the introduction of sex education into the primary school curriculum in the 1970s, the government has gradually established an extensive bureaucratic apparatus to develop and disseminate appropriate teaching materials and to see that sex education is provided by teachers and other educators within the system, nurses working for the Health Bureaus or by other health professionals employed with a non-profit organization such as a university or hospital. However, the reality of sex education in the Taiwan primary public schools is that it is actually provided, by and large, by profit-driven corporations such as P&G and Wacoal and for good reason: the system as it was designed and administered by the Ministry of Education and Department of Health is dysfunctional and there is little pressure from anyone to improve the situation. But the purpose of this study is not to cast blame on the sex education system. For bureaucratic and financial reasons, corporate-sponsored sex education appears to be here to stay. Given this situation, the question then is to determine how good a job the corporations are doing at providing sex education in the primary schools. That is the purpose of this thesis.
In the first two chapters, I contrast the extraordinary disparities between appearance and reality of sex education in the Taiwan primary public school system. In Chapter One, I describe the genealogy and bureaucratic system designed to provide sex education as mandated by the Ministry of Education’s “Gender Equity education” policy. In Chapter Two, I describe the reality of sex education in the schools as observed first hand during a six-month field study of sex education conducted at various public primary schools in the Taichung and Taipei areas. This stage included interviews of Health Bureau nurses, school officials, teachers, students, and four corporate representatives of P&G and Wacoal corporations.
In my third chapter, in an effort to assess the effectiveness of corporate sponsored sex education in the primary schools, I describe and analyze a typical primary school presentation by the Wacoal corporation as given to approximately fifty National Central University sophomore students, whom I subsequently surveyed and consulted in a series of roundtable discussions, from which emerged a number of practical suggestions for improving sex education in the public system. | en_US |