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Bodies Count AIDS Review 2006 discusses the role of education and the response of the educational system to HIV and AIDS. It has long been believed that schools were one of the most effective places to address HIV and AIDS. Indeed AIDS education in schools has often been referred to as a ‘social vaccine’ equipping young people with a lifetime protection against infection and giving them the means to develop and sustain sexual behaviour that will not carry the risk of infection. There has been an emphasis on the role of teachers to ensure that HIV and AIDS education is taught in schools and that teachers can also act in some way as social mediators of the impact of HIV and AIDS on young people.
Whether in fact schools are a good place for HIV and AIDS education to take place has rarely been debated. Whether teachers can, or indeed should be expected to do HIV and AIDS education as part of their work as teachers has not been discussed to any significant extent – least of all by teacher unions and professional bodies. It is all too often, and erroneously believed that, if teachers do not, or are unwilling to do HIV and AIDS education then this is because they have personal issues with their own sexuality and sexual behaviour, rather than asking whether HIV and AIDS education should be part and parcel of the work of teachers.
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About the author:
Jonathan D. Jansen is the former Dean of Education at the University of Pretoria and former Administrator of the Durban University of Technology. His doctoral studies on the state and curriculum in Zimbabwe were completed at Stanford (1991). His latest book is on social cohesion in white working class schools (University Press of America, 2007) and his recent journal publications focus on the leadership of transition. He has an Honorary Doctorate in Education from the University of Edinburgh and several national awards for research and research capacity building. He is Vice President of the Academy of Science of South Africa and a Fellow of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement for Teaching. He started a Fulbright scholarship at Stanford University in October 2007 to complete a book entitled The Politics of Memory which deals with how South African students remember and enact a past in which they were not present.
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