Sex education is the smuggled Trojan horse galloping through the gates of Kenyan classrooms, and too many are clapping as though salvation has arrived. But peel back the glittering rhetoric and you will see the beast for what it is: a calculated erosion of innocence, a cultural import masquerading as progress and a slippery slope greased with sweet sounding vocabulary that threatens to turn our children’s schools into laboratories of moral experimentation.
Kenya, with all her challenges, still stands on the strong legs of culture, family and faith. Ours is a society where children still kneel to greet elders, where mothers teach daughters with quiet wisdom by the fireplace and where fathers counsel sons not in PowerPoint slides but in lived example.
To outsource this sacred duty of shaping children’s sexual morality to strangers armed with foreign funded manuals is not just laziness; it is betrayal. Education is supposed to be about sharpening minds, not awakening desires. Yet the more we romanticize sex education, the more we fast track our children into a world of confusion and curiosity they are not ready to handle.
The defenders of sex education chant the same chorus: prevention of early pregnancies, protection from HIV, empowerment to make ‘informed choices.’ It sounds neat, even noble. But look closely: what these phrases disguise is a philosophy that normalizes indulgence rather than restrains it.
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Sex education, as it is packaged, does not whisper discipline; it shouts permission. When you tell a teenager, ‘Here is how to protect yourself when you do it,’ you have already told them, ‘We expect you to do it.’ And when the expectation is seeded, experimentation is inevitable. What you teach is what you normalize and what you normalize is what will flourish.
A nation that cannot feed all her children, that is still struggling to fix school infrastructure and teacher shortages, is suddenly finding energy to debate condoms in classrooms. Priorities? Upside down. Kenyan schools should be hothouses of ambition, where young people dream of inventions, poems, science and solutions, not forums where anatomy diagrams are turned into rehearsal notes for premature indulgence. If education is the fire that lights the future, then sex education is the bucket of cold water poured on that fire, leaving smoke where flames should have roared.
And let’s talk about culture. We are Kenyans before we are anything else. We do not parent like the West. We do not handle children like laboratory rats, testing theories of morality imported from Europe and America. Our culture has built in mechanisms for addressing sexuality; initiation rites, communal wisdom, religious teaching. These are not outdated relics; they are anchors that have steadied generations. But sex education seeks to uproot these anchors and float our children into a sea where ‘my body, my choice’ becomes the anthem before they even understand what responsibility truly means. To teach sex education in schools is not education; it is indoctrination. It is planting Western weeds in African soil and hoping maize will still grow.
The irony is deafening. The same leaders who ban miraa chewing in schools, who forbid dyed hair and miniskirts, who demand discipline in every other sphere, want to sit children down and hand them sexual toolkits. Imagine the contradiction: ‘Do not hug too long, don’t bring phones to school, don’t run in corridors, but here, take a packet of condoms just in case.’
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What message is that? It is the educational equivalent of locking the front door and leaving the back wide open. Discipline in one area cannot coexist with indulgence in another. If schools are temples of learning, why are we inviting merchants of indulgence to set up stalls inside the sanctuary?
Parents, too, should not abdicate. The home is the natural cradle of sexual instruction. A mother’s whisper, a father’s warning, a community’s expectations; these are the time-tested sex education manuals that carry weight. When a child hears from a parent, it carries moral authority; when the same comes from a teacher bound by curriculum, it carries curiosity. And curiosity, at that volatile teenage stage, is a dangerous fuel. To replace the home with the classroom is to replace moral roots with academic experiments.
Yes, Kenya is grappling with teenage pregnancies. Yes, HIV still lurks. Yes, ignorance can be deadly. But the solution is not to unleash sexual manuals on teenagers who are barely learning algebra. The solution is to strengthen families, restore parental authority, sharpen moral instruction in churches, mosques, temples and empower communities to reclaim their traditional role. You don’t fight fire by sprinkling kerosene; you fight fire by cutting off the oxygen. Teen pregnancies are not cured by telling teenagers how to navigate lust; they are prevented by teaching them how to master it.
The soul of our education system is at stake. If we let sex education sink its claws into the curriculum, we will have brilliant students who can name contraceptives but cannot name career paths, who can diagram reproductive systems but cannot diagram ambition, who can describe intimacy but cannot describe discipline. We will graduate a generation fluent in indulgence and illiterate in responsibility.
Kenya must draw a line. Education should not become a conveyor belt for imported ideologies. Let schools remain the sanctuaries of mathematics, history, language and dreams. Let sexuality remain the sacred conversation of home, family, faith and culture. The minute we let schools carry that burden, we invite chaos dressed in curriculum. And chaos, once invited, never leaves politely. Sex education does not belong in Kenyan schools. Not now. Not ever.
By Raphael Ng’ang’a
About the writer:
Raphael Ng’ang’a is a seasoned teacher of English, author and trainer with a passion for literature, culture and the moral fabric of society. He writes with conviction, challenging ideas that threaten to
erode values in Kenyan schools.
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