“It starts with sex,” he told his parents recently and went on explain, in painstaking detail, about sperms, eggs and the outcome of coital activity.

His folks are still dumbfounded by the matter-of-fact manner in which he talks about sex and procreation and feel quite unhappy that the scales have fallen from their son’s eyes far too soon. 

But as it turns out, Chama learnt about the facts of life in school from his class teacher, Mrs. Zimba.  In a different time and place, she could have been prosecuted for corrupting the morals of a minor.   However, in this case, the law is on her side because Mrs. Zimba is doing things strictly by the book.  

The book in question is a Grade 4 Integrated Science Pupils’ textbook approved for use in Zambian schools by the Ministry of Education.  Written by Mary Mutelo and Mirriam Kasitu and published in 2007 by Mwajionera Publishers Ltd under the Pathways to Success series, it is part of the new syllabus modified from the old Environmental Science syllabus. 

Among other things, it focuses on the human body and the changes it undergoes at puberty, conception and the wages of unprotected sex.

If you are reading this article right now but haven’t come across the book I am talking about, look it up and draw your own conclusions.

This no-holds-barred approach to sex education is, I gather, part of the national  response to the HIV and AIDS pandemic.  It is meant to influence the behaviour of children positively while they are still in their formative years and protect them from infection and risky lifestyles when they become sexually mature. 

The power of education as a talisman against disease is one that Father Michael Kelly, an Irish Jesuit scholar who has lived and worked in Zambia and Africa for more than 50 years, supports wholeheartedly. 

In a 2008 book entitled Education: For An Africa Without AIDS, he argues that intertwining AIDS and education is a realistic answer to the pandemic.  “The AIDS pandemic has seen the emergence of a relatively new sociological phenomenon known as the child-headed household. This is a household in which there is no adult member and where, by tacit consent, the oldest or most dynamic among a group of children assumes the economic and quasi-parental responsibility for the others…Children who head households of this nature may be as young as 10, but communities usually try to intervene with other arrangements when all those in the household are under 10 or prepubescent,” Father Kelly explains.

One AIDS activist who shares his view is Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, former Republican president.  He says: “Given the right educational opportunities, support and values, the young people of this world need never become infected with HIV. Through the work of schools, teachers and education systems, they can learn to live responsible lives and to protect themselves against infection…But education can succeed in protecting the future of people and the world only if it is well used at ALL levels (own emphasis) and has a sense of what it is trying to achieve.”

But not everyone is convinced that exposing children to the subject of sex early  is the best way of dealing with the challenge of HIV and AIDS.  Ms. Gertrude Mwewa is among those who have misgivings about the new syllabus. A primary school teacher with 17 years’ experience, she says that the Grade Four Integrated Science Pupils’ Book is too sexually explicit to be an appropriate resource.

“The biggest challenge Grade Four teachers face is how to broach the subject of sex and how babies are made to a class full of children and to demonstrate these things to them.   But as a teacher, I don’t really have a choice in the matter because I am preparing  pupils for an examination and therefore I cannot sensor what is in the syllabus otherwise the children would be deprived of information they need to pass,” she said.

Ms. Mwewa said broaching the subject of sex and human reproduction in government schools where your average Grade Four pupil has either reached puberty or is on the verge of it may not seem much of a problem to the Ministry of Education.  This is because at that age, they can identify with the physical and hormonal changes the textbooks describe.

“In private schools, the situation is very different because most of the pupils we have start school early. Some of them could be eight or nine years in Grade Four, and at that age, they are too young to be exposed to many of the things they are learning,” she said.

Ms.Mwewa said when it comes to curriculum development, teachers are not widely consulted, even though they are the foot soldiers in the frontline of the education system and engage more directly with pupils and parents than policy makers and pen pushers at the Ministry do.

“Sometimes, these reforms have taken place because donors have insisted on funding certain aspects and government has adopted them. But government must realise what the long-term effects of these developments are.  I may be a teacher but I am also a mother with two daughters in Grades Three and Six.  As a mother, I shouldn’t be answering some of the questions are children are bringing home from school,” she said.

Chama’s mother, ba-na Chichi agrees. “When a boy my son’s age wets his bed and  tells you it’s because he had a wet dream, then you know you have a serious problem,” she said.

Indeed, but how young should we be before we formally learn about sex?   It was a question I tried to answer in this column some 12 years ago.  And the circumstances that brought it all up were not too different, if my memory serves me correctly.  I’d just watched Arnold Schwazennegger in the movie Kindergarten Cop where he plays a police man who goes undercover at a nursery school to catch a dangerous criminal.  One day, he asks the toddlers in his class what their parents did for a living. One little boy said: “My father is a gynaecologist. He spends all day looking up women’s vaginas!”

Now it is easy to laugh at such a deadpan statement coming from a child and say: after all, it is only a movie.  But personally, I don’t think this  is something a four-year-old should be saying—even in a movie!  The way I see it, he has plenty of time to grow up and know what gynaecologists do and to what end.  But all this raises serious questions about the ideology of knowledge.  When do we need to know what and why?  When is the right time?  In other words, when it comes to the dissemination of knowledge and information, sometimes timing is everything.

And talking about timing, I was a 15-year-old Form Three student when I was first formally introduced to human reproduction—seven years older than Chama is now.  Many people my age or older will undoubtedly remember that back then, you did not learn about the science of conception in primary school.  Period.

Of course, you could say that our times were not as desperate as they are now—and that desperate times call for desperate measures.   Indeed.  We grew up at a time when HIV and AIDS did not exist, when the most expensive price you could ever pay with the wages of sin was gonorrhea or syphilis.  But both were curable. If you were female, you had to shoulder the burden of an unwanted pregnancy.  If you were a guy and got the clap and were too ashamed to go the hospital or clinic for treatment, you bought antibiotics in the backstreets of town, no questions asked.  This was the conventional wisdom we acquired through the hidden curriculum at boarding school.

These experiences, plus my own embarrassing encounter with sex education, found voice in an article I published in this column on 9 September.  Here is an extract from that 2005 article  which I called A Parent’s Diary:

“When I was 16, my widowed mother tried to tell me about the birds and the bees.  Her discomfiture made the lesson one of the most embarrassing experiences I have ever had to encounter.  She dropped a lot of veiled hints but the s-word was something she couldn’t bring herself to mention.  To this day, I am not sure whether her discomfiture was the result of an old-school Presbyterian upbringing or because she found herself having to play the complicated role of father in the absence of one to her only begotten son.

“By comparison, my best friend’s mother was a liberal.  She bought him a book entitled Everything A Boy Needs to Know About Sex and encouraged him to bring his female friends home!  And Ernest, my friend from grade school right through to high school, had a father who was just as liberal and broke things down for him in a way that would have made the blackest African blush!

“Not that any of these things registered much. After all, at 16, we had had all the unstructured, unplugged, X-rated sex education we thought we needed.  And our teachers came in the form of older boys at boarding school who, in our estimation, were wiser in the ways of the world than we were. 

“For some reason, these memories have been flashing through my mind lately, like the re-run of some old movie, perhaps because I have found myself pondering when, what and how to tell my teenage sons about the birds and the bees and everything else that comes with it, especially in the age of HIV/AIDS, MTV, pornographic hip hop videos oozing with testosterone and unbridled debauchery and CDs which come with lyrics that are so X-rated that by law, they have to come with Parental Advisory: Explicit Content labels!”

Am I becoming paranoid in old age or is the world turning upside down and inside out?  It is a question I have asked myself a few times since I read somewhere that Time turns the fiercest radical into a conservative as the years go by.