“You can have sex after you get married”: how sex ed is taught in Polish schools

By Anna Hackett

Sex education has been dragged into Poland’s election campaign, with the conservative ruling party seeking to restrict access to schools for groups that provide such classes while opposition parties want to expand sex ed. Often lost in this debate are the voices of those most directly involved. We spoke to pupils and teachers from around Poland about how this subject is taught in schools.

“When asked about something connected to sex, she [the teacher] would just say, ‘You can have sex after you get married’.”

This was Agata Michalska’s experience in high school of the subject Education for Family Life (Wychowanie do Życia w Rodzinie, or WDŻ, in Polish), which is the closest thing to sex education provided for in the Polish curriculum.

Those classes were taught by the school librarian. “It was easy to see that she didn’t have a lot of knowledge on this. You could tell they just put in a teacher who had some free hours available,” says Michalska, who adds that the librarian’s religious views heavily influenced the lesson’s narrative.

The school principal was also apathetic about WDŻ, telling students “you have to attend these classes but you can do other homework during them”, says Michalska, who graduated from high school in 2020.

Earlier, however, in middle school, she had had a much more positive experience. There, her WDŻ classes were taught by a biology teacher and primarily centred on puberty, and Michalska found them very informative.

“Attendance is decreasing every year”

Michalska’s experiences are typical of the inconsistencies – and, many argue, deficiencies – Polish students face in the teaching of sex education. Indeed, many pupils and teachers told us that a growing number of students are simply opting out of WDŻ, which is optional, altogether.

Tomasz Kamiński is in his final year of high school in Poznań. He says that, like the majority of his classmates, he has stopped attending WDŻ classes and instead gets his information from the internet or his friends.

Michalska likewise admits that almost everything she knows about sex came from her boyfriend and internet education campaigns promoted by companies such as Durex.

Magdalena Szmidt, an English teacher working in Poznań, has noticed the trend of low student turnout at WDŻ classes in her school too.

“Attendance is decreasing every year. In my current grade, four students out of 23 in the class attend these lessons,” she says. Amongst the older grades, sometimes only one or two students attend.

In Lublin, teacher Katarzyna Jaworska believes issues with timetabling and choice of teachers are the main cause.

“WDŻ is included in the timetable at times that make it difficult for young people to participate, such as 7:30 a.m. as an additional 9th lesson for an 8-hour day, or 3:30 p.m. after an already busy day,” she says, explaining that students feel so overwhelmed with compulsory subjects that count towards their grades that WDŻ becomes expendable.

Sex education taught by nuns

Meanwhile, “many high school students in public schools drop out of these lessons because they are often taught by religion teachers, catechists who are usually nuns,…[so] there is probably church indoctrination about abortion, homophobia, prohibition of contraception, etc.”, says Jaworska.

Kamiński confirms this, saying that he and his friends would have attended the classes if they had been better scheduled in the school timetable and if the teacher had been someone “more student friendly”.

In a study of Poles’ experience of sex education published earlier this year – based on a survey of almost 11,000 people – sex education group Ponton found that those whose WDŻ classes had been led by religion teachers gave them the worst ratings. Classes led by qualified sex educators or biology teachers had the best ratings.

But even when students have qualified teachers for WDŻ, the programme’s curriculum restricts what they can teach.

In Poland, the subject is “subordinated to Christian values, where religion is considered the foundation of the relationship between a man and a woman”, says Anna Bocian, a psychologist who teaches WDŻ at a school in Lublin. She believes the programme is in need of an overhaul.

Ponton’s survey bears out this view. It found that 74% of respondents did not obtain reliable knowledge during WDŻ classes about sexual consent and 50% did not receive enough information on contraception. Only 10% received reliable information on sexual orientation and 6% on gender identity.

Three approaches to sex education

There are three main approaches to sex education, with WDŻ adhering to Type A, which promotes abstinence as the primary form of contraception and typically encourages students to refrain from having sex until marriage.

Type B focuses on teaching the biology and physiology of the reproductive system and procreation. In Poland, this is not provided in WDŻ classes, but is covered to some extent in biology lessons.

Type C is a holistic approach that teaches the emotional, physical, and mental aspects of sexuality.

While Type A is recommended by conservative medical groups like the American College of Pediatricians, it has been criticised by the European Union, the United Nations and medical associations like the American Academy of Paediatrics.

According to the UN, “programmes that promote abstinence-only have been found to be ineffective in delaying sexual initiation, reducing the frequency of sex or reducing the number of sexual partners” and are “more likely to contain incomplete or inaccurate information” on topics like intercourse, homosexuality and abortion.

The UN and EU encourage comprehensive sex education, Type C, as the best way to educate young people about sex and to reduce rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unwanted pregnancies, gender inequality, and sexual violence.

Encouraging abstinence

The Polish education authorities disagree. Teaching material for WDŻ approved by the education ministry vouches for the pro-abstinence approach and condemns “permissive sex education”.

Bocian explains there is a textbook monopoly in Poland for WDŻ, as all the materials approved by the education ministry for the subject belong to one series: Wędrując ku Dorosłości: Wychowanie do życia w rodzinie (Wandering Towards Adulthood: Growing up in the family).

There are numerous editions of the book, adapted for different grades, but all are authored either by Teresa Król or a combination of Król, Grażyna Węglarczyk and Magdalena Guziak-Nowak, the education director of a pro-life organisation.

The WDŻ textbook for the eighth grade of primary school (when children are aged around 14) introduces WDŻ as a guide for teaching students a sense of moral responsibility in accordance with values like sexual abstinence, stability of marriage and respect for human life.

It argues that comprehensive sex education increases risky sexual behaviour by children and adolescents and singles out as an example Germany, where “there is a massive increase in the amount of sexual abuse among children and adolescents”.

By contrast, in Poland, “after 20 years of pro-family and pro-abstinence Type A sex education, one can speak of a moderate but certain success”, the book reads, claiming that Poland has the lowest teenage abortion rate in Europe.

However, this fails to account for Poland having had since the 1990s one of the continent’s strictest abortion laws – with terminations allowed only in a very narrow set of cases – which results in many women and girls obtaining unregistered abortions illegally or travelling abroad for them.

Scepticism towards contraception – as opposed to “natural family planning” – can be seen throughout the textbooks and their accompanying “lesson scenarios”, one of which tells students that adopting “the contraceptive mentality” increases the likelihood of abortion, reports news website OKO.press.

According to Bocian, the textbooks’ ideology is obvious and makes them ineffective as teaching tools.

“Their content ends where the students’ interest begins,” she says, explaining that the books assume that no sex occurs before marriage and are intolerant towards anything deviating from the norm of heterosexual intercourse taking place within marriage and for the purpose of conception.

More liberal sex education “a pipe dream in today’s political climate”

Instead, when teaching WDŻ, Bocian only uses the textbooks to plan lesson topics, preferring to lead the class in her own way, “teaching tolerance and respect, showing young people life is different and that this is normal”.

Bocian is not expecting change anytime soon. “The possibility of introducing other more liberal alternative textbooks is even more of a pipe dream in today’s political climate,” she says.

Poland’s current education minister, Przemysław Czarnek, is an ultraconservative figure who has railed against comprehensive, Type C sex education, which he claims “morally corrupts” and “sexualises” children. Last year, he declared that “brainwashing” by sex educators was responsible for a rise in suicide attempts by young people.

Czarnek and the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party have sought to pass legislation making it harder for NGOs that lead such classes to access schools.

Czarnek argues that such a law would enable the authorities to prevent the “indoctrination of children” by groups teaching “content that is completely incompatible with the core curriculum”.

So far, two efforts to pass this “Lex Czarnek”, as the law has been dubbed, were ultimately vetoed by President Andrzej Duda. However, PiS is currently supporting a further initiative to introduce similar legislation.

Unsurprisingly, the types of organisations that Czarnek wants to prevent from entering schools fundamentally disagree with his characterisation of their actions. They claim they are providing a much-needed – and demanded – service to young Poles, who have been let down by the education authorities.

“Our programme emerged from the needs of youths; young people created it and we just refined it,” says Aleksandra Dulas, head of Łódź-based educational foundation Spunk, which has been providing voluntary, extracurricular comprehensive sex education programmes in schools for over a decade.

The ultimate goal of these workshops, Dulas says, is to educate young people so when they become sexually active, they can “make informed and conscious decisions so as not to harm themselves or others”.

During the workshops, educators discuss topics like puberty, consent, peer pressure, contraception, disease prevention, and sexual orientation.

Dulas believes the current WDŻ programme is “discriminatory and exclusionary, especially towards non-heteronormative people” as well as children reared in single-parent or blended families, which she says are increasingly common but “do not fit the very narrow vision” presented in WDŻ classes.

She also notes that WDŻ portrays gender roles stereotypically while omitting themes relevant to modern life, like gender equality, family conflict resolution and different sexualities.

Legal challenges

She believes that, while the programme has always been lacking, there is now also increasing pressure on school principals from higher up to ensure topics like LGBT issues are not discussed during lessons.

Though its workshops are optional, Spunk has occasionally itself faced hostility from parents who disapprove of its presence in schools, including a complaint to one provincial board of education.

Ordo Iuris, a conservative advocacy group, is regularly contacted by parents seeking advice on how to prevent sex education groups from entering schools, says Rafał Dorosiński, the director of the group’s Legal Analysis Centre.

“We have strong norms in Polish educational law that provides parents with the ability to agree or disagree with these kinds of activities,” Dorosiński notes.

His organisation is happy to assist parents with their concerns over such workshops as they consider the current WDŻ curriculum a great achievement of the Polish education system and wish to preserve it.

Dorosiński states that WDŻ is more effective than the “deeply ideological” sex education in western Europe, which he says encourages teenagers to be selfish by discouraging them from pursuing stable relationships and having children.

He also fears that comprehensive sex education will expose students to inappropriate content: “Lessons about putting a condom on are not something that is appropriate for school in general. [But] it’s not only lessons on how to put on a condom, it’s also lessons on all kinds of deviancies.”

Yet among students, there is a clear desire for more comprehensive and objective education about sex and reproductive health. They believe that the current programme leaves them ill-prepared for the realities of the world.

They want educators who are qualified and empathetic towards students, and for the subject to be taken seriously by their schools.

“Students have a great need to talk about or even just listen to topics about sex education,” says Sylwia, a teacher at a secondary school in Pomerania province (who did not want her surname published).

“Politics should not interfere with education,” she argues. “Politics changes all the time, while education is supposed to liberate and raise awareness, to show that there are different ways of doing things.”

But if the government has its way, and a law restricting the access of groups like Spunk to schools is finally passed, access to sex education is set to become even more limited in Poland.

Main image credit: Tomasz Wiech/Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Anna Hackett

Anna Hackett is an assistant editor at Notes from Poland. She is a recent graduate of European Studies from Trinity College Dublin and has had previous journalistic experience with the Irish Independent News & Media group.