The Future of Education

Not provided with adequate information on reproductive health, Indonesian Youth, resorted to self-teaching. This poses a serious problem, since their references are mostly online pornographic materials, rather than resorting to more reliable/educative sources. Unlike western education system that includes sex education as part of the formal/compulsory program, sex education or “reproductive health” (euphemism) in Indonesia is somewhat controversial due to the eastern cultural background that considers sex education as taboo, specifically for teenage and/or adolescence students. Culturally, Indonesians believe that sex would comes ‘naturally’ after marital institution. As the largest population of Islam country, there is also a cultural barrier from the society about sex education from the Islamic perspective. The policy from the Ministry of Education of Indonesia is to allow sex education to be explained in classes, through relevant subjects (e.g. Biology, Religious Studies, Sociology). Delivery of the topic of sex education, is up to the teachers’ preferred method.

In Indonesia, BKKBN (State Ministry for Population and Family Planning) is the responsible government institution for providing information related to reproductive health towards Indonesian youth. Collaborating with BKKBN, as part of a community service of Universitas Padjadjaran, our team decided to held a small workshop on online sex education in a local high-school in Bandung, the capital of West Java, Indonesia. 45 students participated in this non-formal event, in which students were given some basic information related to seeking online information on reproductive health issues through a class talk and a sharing session from peer group educators discussing about online behavior of teenagers, related to reproductive health. Participants were also asked to play thematic games with reproductive health messages.

Before the activity, students were asked to fill a pre-activity questionnaire about their current knowledge and behavior related to reproductive health, more specifically related to their online information seeking behavior and media preferences. After finishing the activity, they were given a post-activity questionnaire that confirmed whether there was any sort of alteration in their behavior and media preferences. This paper provides a detailed description of the entire process of the workshop while also providing descriptive data that illustrates the condition of the participants, based on the pre-activity and post-activity questionnaires. The result of the study suggested that participants of the workshop behavior and media preferences were slightly altered after participating in the workshop.

Keywords: Reproductive Health, Indonesia, Online Information Seeking