European values against the Eurasian
Shame or ordered bargains?
“What a shame!”, “they are depraving us,” “all this is to full the humanity, sooner or later Europe will impose all this on Armenia”… We may bump into such comments and remarks under articles and videos posted by Russian or European sources. Recently we more frequently see such posts characteristic to yellow press. They describe how Europeans provide their children sexual education and give them sexual independence. There are also others, who criticize the Russians for misinterpreting the European posts and news. “The Russian sources don’t have any grounds for such hysteria because in many European countries, such as Germany, children were receiving sexual education in schools since the 60s.
Those classes are similar to anatomy, during which they explain to the children the nuances of adult life. After the expansion of HIV the necessity of educating them has increased,” told 168-Zham Gor Hovhannisyan, who resides in Germany five years now and is a profession in Humboldt University of Berlin. In Germany the attendance of children to school is mandatory and the parents are fined for their absent children. Sometimes the parents try to keep their children away from the sex education classes because of religious backgrounds.
According to Hovhannisyan this matter has become a subject for court litigation. In 2004 the court of Hamburg denied the appeals of two female students to be allowed to miss the sex education classes. Two years ago the European Court of Human Rights denied 5 individual appeals from Baptist, in which they were complaining that Germany would limit their religious principles.
According to the European Court, the German law rules out home education and they intend to integrate the children into the German society. In order to do so they also provide neutral knowledge about sex in order to make the children more literate and careful about their sexual future as adults. “Perhaps sexual education sounds a little strange to Armenians but it is merely a matter of mentality.
In German schools they only provide information and they do no deprave the children,” added Hovhannisyan. It is a law in German to present the school curriculum to the parents; discuss it with them and then approve it. But there is no such practice in Armenia. At any rate, if in our schools the teachers speak about the class on sexual education in the anatomy books only silently and shamefully for decades then over time these topics should become less shameful.
If the children have questions they may apply to the teachers and get answers. During a conversation with 168-Zham the head of the education department of the National Institute of Education Melania Davtyan spoke about this. In her words, in schools there are sexual education textbooks for students of 8-9 and 10-11 grades.
“We provide the children information on how to be cautious about their sexual future, receive basic information about the sexual relations of girls and boys, how to take care of the hygiene because it is not only a physiological but also a psychological matter.”
Davtyan noted that the European textbooks are not very understandable for us because our children are not ready to speak about those matters at such early ages. Recently a Spanish textbook on sexual education translated by Edit Print was denied. It is strange why the social networks are now actively discussing the sexual education in Europe. According to an expert of the Political and Analytical International Center Ruben Mehrabyan information war is declared between two projects.
On the one hand we have the European Comprehensive Associative Agreement and on the other hand we have supporters of the Eurasian Union. “They are trying to portray the negative traits of the European culture in order to create a massive negative thinking within the society.
Indeed, this is a quite subtle theme because the lie and semi-truth are offered to the public to create certain reaction in the society. But the people should be clearly explained that these are speculations,” said Mehrabyan. On the other hand, the specialist believes that each society is valued to the extent of its moral values and merits.
We mean the legal equality of people. Sexual minorities make only 1-2% of the west, east and Armenia and they also have the right of life security. In Mehrabyan’s words, it is an issue, which should have a solution, and it should have a civilized solution because the opposite is characteristic to concentration camps. He emphasized that in EU-Armenia relations the most important thing is the criteria of democratic political development.
“The Armenian society has pretty high moral values. I don’t think here we have the threat that is presented to our society. In terms of immorality in Armenia it is more important to pay attention to the strong corrupt links between politics and business. This fuss is indeed coming from Moscow and the circles which have the Russian order to create mess,” said Mehrabyan.
By Gayane Khachatryan
