Health and sexuality: contemporary approaches on education

Abstract

This article discusses teaching  in relation to health and sexuality based on the National Common Curricular Basis (in portuguese, BNCC), approved in 2017 to guide the restructuring of the curricula of Brazilian schools. Educating for health goes beyond the adoption of healthy practices and educating for sexuality implies facing prejudices rooted in moral and religious principles that become obstacles to human formation based on ethics and freedom. The objective is to analyze how the BNCC is contemplating the themes of health and sexuality in elementary education, in order to problematize the teaching that is necessary to go beyond the biological perspective, towards the cultural and social issues involved in these themes. It is a qualitative study that uses the  Content Analysis on the BNCC, constituting a corpus of analysis organized according to the a priori categories: health education and sex education. The results show that health education is present in the general competences and in the skills of three curricular components. The theme of sexuality, on the other hand, appears only in the 8th grade, in science teaching, and only one skill addresses sexuality from cultural and social aspects. The conclusions indicate that the document deals with health with relevance, from the perspective of promoting individual and collective health, while sexuality is limited and restricted, characterized by a biological view. This increases the challenge of teacher training and the construction of contemporary curricula.