I remember the day my sixth grade teacher told us that we were going to learn about reproduction; as soon as he spoke the “reproduction”, everyone in class began to giggle. We were so excited that he called us “bad boys and girls”, to which we all laughed. After 6th grade, I encountered this same topic again in 9th grade. However, unlike in 6th grade, I couldn’t risk giggling or asking too many questions; this was because aside the fact that the lesson was more of a lecture than discussion, considering the social stigma attached to issue of sex among the youth2, no one in class (including me) wanted to appear too interested in the topic out of fear of what the teacher might think. In the end however, I did learn something about HIV/AIDS; I learned about its modes of transmission and how one can protect himself from contracting it, including abstinence and condom use.
However, even though I was told how to use condom, I was not taught exactly how to use it. Research on information based HIV interventions and skill-based HIV interventions found that people who were taught how to protect themselves by example actually did try to protect themselves every time they had sex than those who were simply told how to do so10. The Curriculum Research Development Division (CRDD) of the Ghana Education Service (GES) provides guidelines which enable teachers to teach HIV/AIDS material; although the teachers do teach about the disease, this approach does not seem to be having any significant impact on sexual behavior among the youth in Ghana11.
Therefore, introducing skill based HIV/STD risk reduction interventions, like teaching students exactly how to put on a condom or how to request that a partner use a condom, into senior secondary school curriculums, not just in the Eastern Region but across Ghana as a whole may go a long way in bridging the gap between what students learn for grades and what they learn for life. It is wise to introduce these changes only into senior secondary school curriculums because considering the social and cultural concerns surrounding the discussion of sex with adolescents and the youth in general, senior secondary school students will generally be considered more mature than their counterparts in junior secondary schools to receive such information and training.