Category: Young people

Penguin Random House launches high schoolers’ award to combat book bans

The publisher’s $10,000 Freedom of Expression prize invites teens to write about a banned book that changed their life, against a backdrop of rising censorship

Publisher Penguin Random House has launched a new writing award in the US celebrating freedom of expression in response to a rise in book bans across the country.

The Freedom of Expression award invites applicants to write about one banned book that changed their life and why. The $10,000 (£8,168) prize will be awarded to a high-school student planning to attend university in 2024.

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When Mum made me a class celebrity | Brief letters

Sex education | Quarter-zipper, all style | Older slogan wear | Stale pasties | Knight rider

I sympathise with Zoe Williams’s daughter (An old video of me is on the school curriculum! Unfortunately, I am shocked by my own arguments, 7 March). My mother, an eminent and pioneering Cambridge don, gave the first ever sex education lessons in my convent school, in the 1960s, to my class. Heaps of embarrassment – followed by a sudden popularity, as I must have been the fount of all sexual knowledge, surely? Thanks, Mum.
Louise Wallace
Cropredy, Oxfordshire

• Reading about quarter-zippers (Quarter-zipper becomes the new status symbol for men of a certain position, 4 March) at breakfast, I find it hard to believe that mine, moth-eaten in parts and unravelling with old age, is a status symbol. I shall have to reconsider my decision to restrict it to home wear only.
Ron Jacob
London

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Purity culture is dehumanising – it’s consent that should be at the centre of sex education | Chanel Contos

If we are educating young people for the purpose of safety, our concern should not be if they are having sex but if they are doing so consensually

Many would have been surprised on Monday night when an ABC Four Corners episode reported that for some schools in Australia, their form of sex education included placing a piece of sticky tape on different surfaces around the classroom. An inspection of the tape after the experiment concluded that it had picked up dirt along the way; and it was no longer able to “stick” or “bond” with anything (anyone) any more. The schools have denied teaching misinformation and said they complied with the New South Wales curriculum.

Unfortunately, I was not surprised hearing these allegations as I’ve heard the same before. It would be nice to believe these lessons were limited to the four schools under investigation, but also seriously ignorant.

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Welsh education minister hits out at ‘misinformation’ over LGBTQ+ curriculum

Campaigners are putting teachers under pressure, says Jeremy Miles after verdict in high court challenge

The Welsh education minister has accused campaigners of putting teachers under pressure by deliberately spreading “misinformation” about the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues.

Jeremy Miles also told of how he struggled to find his place in the world as a gay young person, in an era when “someone like me” did not exist as far as the school curriculum was concerned.

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By changing young people’s attitudes, we can tackle violence against women | Cordelia Morrison

The school workshops I run have shown me that damaging attitudes towards sex, gender and equality start early

Recently, I delivered a healthy relationships workshop at a primary school. We started by playing a drama game, where we asked the children to pretend to be different types of people. A superhero? Lots of air-punches. What about a girl? The girls laughed awkwardly, while the boys pouted, pretended to cry, and fell to the floor.

“Why are you down there,” I asked the boy nearest me. He beamed, and said: “Cos girls are scaredy-cats and they, like, faint and stuff.” “OK,” said my co-facilitator, “how do the girls in the room feel about that?” A pause. Shuffling. One girl eventually volunteered: “It makes me feel sad. And it’s not fair. We’re not all the same.”

Cordelia Morrison is relationships officer for Tender, a charity working to prevent domestic and sexual violence in the lives of children and young people

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By changing young people’s attitudes, we can tackle violence against women | Cordelia Morrison

The school workshops I run have shown me that damaging attitudes towards sex, gender and equality start early

Recently, I delivered a healthy relationships workshop at a primary school. We started by playing a drama game, where we asked the children to pretend to be different types of people. A superhero? Lots of air-punches. What about a girl? The girls laughed awkwardly, while the boys pouted, pretended to cry, and fell to the floor.

“Why are you down there,” I asked the boy nearest me. He beamed, and said: “Cos girls are scaredy-cats and they, like, faint and stuff.” “OK,” said my co-facilitator, “how do the girls in the room feel about that?” A pause. Shuffling. One girl eventually volunteered: “It makes me feel sad. And it’s not fair. We’re not all the same.”

Cordelia Morrison is relationships officer for Tender, a charity working to prevent domestic and sexual violence in the lives of children and young people

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By changing young people’s attitudes, we can tackle violence against women | Cordelia Morrison

The school workshops I run have shown me that damaging attitudes towards sex, gender and equality start early

Recently, I delivered a healthy relationships workshop at a primary school. We started by playing a drama game, where we asked the children to pretend to be different types of people. A superhero? Lots of air-punches. What about a girl? The girls laughed awkwardly, while the boys pouted, pretended to cry, and fell to the floor.

“Why are you down there,” I asked the boy nearest me. He beamed, and said: “Cos girls are scaredy-cats and they, like, faint and stuff.” “OK,” said my co-facilitator, “how do the girls in the room feel about that?” A pause. Shuffling. One girl eventually volunteered: “It makes me feel sad. And it’s not fair. We’re not all the same.”

Cordelia Morrison is relationships officer for Tender, a charity working to prevent domestic and sexual violence in the lives of children and young people

Continue reading…

By changing young people’s attitudes, we can tackle violence against women | Cordelia Morrison

The school workshops I run have shown me that damaging attitudes towards sex, gender and equality start early

Recently, I delivered a healthy relationships workshop at a primary school. We started by playing a drama game, where we asked the children to pretend to be different types of people. A superhero? Lots of air-punches. What about a girl? The girls laughed awkwardly, while the boys pouted, pretended to cry, and fell to the floor.

“Why are you down there,” I asked the boy nearest me. He beamed, and said: “Cos girls are scaredy-cats and they, like, faint and stuff.” “OK,” said my co-facilitator, “how do the girls in the room feel about that?” A pause. Shuffling. One girl eventually volunteered: “It makes me feel sad. And it’s not fair. We’re not all the same.”

Cordelia Morrison is relationships officer for Tender, a charity working to prevent domestic and sexual violence in the lives of children and young people

Continue reading…

By changing young people’s attitudes, we can tackle violence against women | Cordelia Morrison

The school workshops I run have shown me that damaging attitudes towards sex, gender and equality start early

Recently, I delivered a healthy relationships workshop at a primary school. We started by playing a drama game, where we asked the children to pretend to be different types of people. A superhero? Lots of air-punches. What about a girl? The girls laughed awkwardly, while the boys pouted, pretended to cry, and fell to the floor.

“Why are you down there,” I asked the boy nearest me. He beamed, and said: “Cos girls are scaredy-cats and they, like, faint and stuff.” “OK,” said my co-facilitator, “how do the girls in the room feel about that?” A pause. Shuffling. One girl eventually volunteered: “It makes me feel sad. And it’s not fair. We’re not all the same.”

Cordelia Morrison is relationships officer for Tender, a charity working to prevent domestic and sexual violence in the lives of children and young people

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Sex Education creator Laurie Nunn: ‘You can’t make sex scenes flowery!’

She scored a global smash with her TV debut. As the taboo-busting show is green-lit for a return, the writer reveals how she turned teenage dorkiness – and her own experience of sexual assault – into dynamite drama

Laurie Nunn is remembering her own experience of sex education. It was, she says, “practically nonexistent” at her school, which is ironic, given that she is responsible for one of the most candid TV shows ever made about the subject. “They didn’t talk about female pleasure at all,” says the writer. “I’m in my 30s and I feel like I’m only now starting to get the right language to talk about my own body. I think, ‘God, I wish I’d known this stuff when I was in my 20s.’”

When Sex Education was picked up, Nunn had no big credits to her name. She had written and directed a couple of short films and had worked up ideas for production companies, but nothing had quite landed. Then, suddenly, she had a hit – such a hit that Netflix’s UK headquarters now has a Sex Education-themed floor. (We meet on the Stranger Things floor, though. Perhaps the Sex Education floor would have been just too weird.)

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