For 25 years, France has said schools must teach sex ed. Now the government is at last putting a curriculum in place.
Students in France will learn about something new starting in September: sex, gender stereotypes and consent.
Nearly a quarter-century after the French government passed a law mandating — but never putting in place — sex education for every student, it has finally developed and approved a curriculum for sex education classes, with a plan for teacher training and course materials.
“We have been waiting 25 years for this,” said Sarah Durocher, president of Le Planning Familial, a French equivalent of Planned Parenthood — one of three nonprofit organizations that sued the government in 2023 for not implementing its own law.
That lawsuit has yet to be resolved in court. But the government pushed the curriculum through on its own, over the protests of opponents who criticized it as “ideological brainwashing” and harmful to children’s development.
More than 100 senators with the conservative party Les Républicains signed an op-ed, published in Le Figaro newspaper, opposing the program’s “woke ideology” and demanding all mentions of “gender identity” be removed.
But Elisabeth Borne, the education minister, called the new program “absolutely essential.”
She highlighted the findings of an independent commission, which showed that one child in France is sexually abused every three minutes, mostly by a male member of their family. Many kids now learn about sex from online pornography sites, she pointed out.
