Fifth grade would be tough enough for any student without also having to deal with all the changes brought on by the coming on-set of puberty. Indonesia isn’t great about giving its young people comprehensive and practical sexual education (because, y’know, “morality”), but at least most schools cover the very basics of human anatomy for their students.
But it seems the only thing that fifth grade students in the Pasaman regency of West Sumatra, are going to learn about their bodies this semester is that they should be ashamed of them, after the police, and then the region’s Department of Education confiscated science and health textbooks for containing diagrams of male and female anatomy, which were judged to be “vulgar”.
Pasaman Police did raids on a number of school throughout the region earlier this week in order to confiscate the textbooks, supposedly after receiving reports from parents that they contained “pornographic content”. According to police they had the consent of the schools.
“A number of schools also asked us to form a team to trace the books throughout schools in the Rao District. They are willing to surrender them to the police because the book has been troubling [people in the area], “said Rao Police Chief Syamsuir as quoted by JPNN.
In conjunction with the police raid, the Pasaman Department of Education issued a circular banning the textbooks on Wednesday.
However, the head of the Pasaman District Education Council, Yunzar Lubis, told Okezone that he would ask for a review of the prohibition with his superiors, arguing that the confiscated textbooks had been compiled and reviewed by experts from the the Ministry of Education and that they were appropriate and necessary for fifth grade students.
