Health education a salt in (whose) eye?

Objectivity dictates that the demonstrators did not raise slogans raising the superiority of pork chops over broccoli and spinach, nor did they call for replacing water with sweetened beverages. Ba, perhaps a tad surprisingly, there were also no discernible slogans stigmatizing immunizations or daily physical activity. Indeed, those gathered under the red and white flags focused on sex education, however, extending it to the entire subject, which is due to enter schools in September 2025.

Is the information that Poles are protesting against "health education" true? As it is in the media associated with the previous government, it partly is. The Polish citizenship of those gathered in the capital on Sunday cannot be questioned. Health education will also include the broadly understood sphere of human sexuality. Broadly understood, encompassing not only knowledge of contraceptive methods or the rules of safe sex, but perhaps most importantly a whole block of topics related to sexual abuse, harassment and exploitation, and it's really hard to figure out what one must have in one's head to claim that health education will include "masturbation tests" (!).

I probably wouldn't have come across this manipulated material if it hadn't been used - as a source - by one of the industry portals, which also (for a few hours, as the material was later redacted) claimed that Poles were protesting against "health education" (yes, the quotation marks were used there, too), which makes one think hard about the issue of responsibility for words and the content conveyed.

The introduction of a health knowledge subject to schools was included in the National Oncology Strategy six years ago, a postulate that ran throughout the two terms of the Law and Justice government. Of course, it is safe to assume that the core curriculum of this subject - if the decision to introduce it had been made at the time (recall, successive ministers of education claimed that it was impossible to introduce a separate subject due to the overloading of the program) - would probably have been different, and students would not likely have had the opportunity to learn about sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy prevention methods. Probably, too, there would be no topics related to sexual harassment and what is related to this sphere of human life in general. Even if experts point out that the actual age of sexual initiation is decreasing all the time also (or perhaps primarily) because young people lack knowledge.