School sexuality education from the perspective of the target group

Sexuality education in schools has become an integral part of the school curriculum in Germany. According to the latest Youth Sexuality Study (Scharmanski & Hessling, 2022), it is one of the most important sources of sexuality education next to personal conversations and the internet. At the same time, in light of educational research, schools as a place for sexuality education, sexual education and sexual socialisation are subject to a variety of structural, content-related and social restrictions. The challenges adolescents face in dealing with sexuality education at school, their corresponding experiences and how they deal with them still represent a central research desideratum. In the context of an explorative qualitative study based on eight narrative interviews¹ with young people, this article reconstructs the experiences and behavioural patterns in adolescents’ dealing with sexuality education at school. We then outline the corresponding key professional challenges and support requirements for reflecting on paedagogical action in the school context of sexual education. 

Sexuality education in schools is anchored in government guidelines and curricula and has been considered a natural part of sexual education since the late 1990s (Schmidt, 2014). At the same time, however, there is little systematic research on schools as a place of sexual communication. Although particularly sexualized violence in educational contexts has been discussed intensively lately (Retkowski et al., 2018; Wazlawik et al., 2019), only recently has more research been conducted to systematically analyse sexuality education practises in schools from the perspective of teachers (Siemoneit, 2021; Langer, 2017; Hoffmann, 2016) and recipients (Klein & Schweitzer, 2018; Schweitzer, 2023). While today almost all pedagogical concepts of sexuality education in schools reflect a fundamental recognition of the social pluralisation of lifestyles, there are some indications that these concepts are currently of little importance in everyday school life (Scharmanski & Hessling, 2022; Hoffmann, 2016). Similarly, more differentiated empirical knowledge concerning the perspectives of the addressees that takes their social, gender and gender-specific backgrounds into account remains a central desideratum in the empirical, theoretical and practical debate on sexuality education in schools. The interviews of the exploratory study presented here made clear that discrepancies between the subjective relevance and the sexuality-related everyday realities, on the one hand, and the content and forms of sexuality education at school, on the other hand, are experienced ambivalently. The addressees approach and cope with these challenging discrepancies in different ways. Various other experiences in the classroom context, in the form of discrimination, heteronomy and disregard, are formulated in particular by nonheterosexual adolescents. It becomes clear that sexuality education at school not only provides a framework for formal sexual education but also functions as a “place of normative subject formation” (Kleiner, 2015); pupils are often addressed in a heteronormative way and are expected to behave accordingly. The themes of the reconstructive analyses in this project are thus the perceived lack of correspondence between curricular educational content and individual sexual life practises, desires and themes and the experiences of deficient differentiation as significant shared realities of adolescents experiencing sexual education at school. 

The adolescents’ narratives reveal different ways of dealing with these experiences of discrepancy and difference, which can be reconstructed as two overarching patterns of dealing with sexuality education at school: 

The first pattern comprises the adolescents’ self-positioning as stakeholders in their sexual lives. In the corresponding biographical narratives, we find a high degree of certainty of orientation, a firm conviction of their own ability to act, a strong focus on personal responsibility and stable self-efficacy convictions. They respond to experiences of discrepancy and difference in the context of sexuality education at school predominantly with efforts to reconcile, dethematise and normalise. Characteristically, when under discussion, these young adults succeed in harmonising their sexual orientation with the existing heteronormative order in the school setting through interpretations of conformity. For example, this is the case with Sonja, who is 19 years old at the time of the interview, describes herself as lesbian and has just completed her abitur (A-levels). Whenever her classmates address Sonja as a lesbian young woman, she normalises her sexual orientation through analogisation. This is also the case in the following passage, when Sonja was asked by a classmate during sexuality education lessons about her experiences: “Yes, I was asked in class how I came to be a lesbian, and then I always said it like this: It’s exactly the same as with you. You think a boy is great; with me, it’s just a girl. That’s all. It’s actually the same thing” (Sonja, 19, lesbian, secondary school). 

In her interactions, Sonja leaves little room for potential attempts by her classmates to call her out in this context by negating any supposed or real differences regarding her sexual desires. In line with this strategy of normalisation and not mentioning experiences of discrimination and disregard, Sonja reports far fewer homonegative experiences during her time at school than the other nonheterosexual interviewees. Nevertheless, like all nonheterosexual interviewees, she reports experiencing exclusively heteronormative sexuality education that has nothing to do with the reality of her sexual life: “I already knew indirectly back then that I would never need that." 

Nadim can also be described as having planned his sexual life. He is 21 years old at the time of the interview, describes himself as heterosexual, has graduated from secondary school and is currently studying at a technical college. He reports extensive experiences of racist discrimination by his teachers because of his origin and religious affiliation. In Nadim’s experience, sexuality is discussed at school almost exclusively in the sense of problematisation, that is, discussions of sexuality take place only when there are problems from the teachers’ point of view. In his summary of his sexuality education lessons, Nadim attributes little subjective relevance to the content he experienced and the perceived biological constrictions of the school’s sexuality education. Rather, what he considers important he learns from his Islamic teacher: “Since I’ve become more religious, I feel much more enlightened about sexuality. Of course, I didn’t really have a complete overview before; when it came to sexuality, I was rather half-enlightened. You always saw it on the street, yes, you always have to do it this way or that way with a girl, she’ll like it. Everyone was always so macho, but my teacher in Islamic education was very open with me. I was very ashamed to talk to him about it.” (Nadim, 21, heterosexual, secondary school) For Nadim, the “hot topics” in school sexuality education, such as pornography consumption, masturbation or how to deal with young women, are issues you cannot discuss at school. So, he explicitly deals with topics like these outside of school, especially with his religious teacher. 

Sebastian is 19 years old at the time of the interview, attends secondary school and describes himself as gay. He also feels that the content of his sexuality education at school is inadequate and too far removed from the reality of his sexual life: “I think he [the teacher] didn’t explain enough about how STDs are still transmitted. It’s not like sex consists only of … inserting the penis into the vagina. So, I asked myself: Can you somehow get STDs from blowjobs, too? I didn’t know anything, so I thought an hour was too short. I only found out about all this at the queer youth centre.” (Sebastian, 19, gay, secondary school) 

It is by no means a new finding that teachers often fail to discuss sexuality-related topics that go beyond the biological dimension (Heßling & Bode, 2015, p. 36), even if it is precisely those topics that students would like to learn more about (ibid., p. 70). Nadim and Sebastian compensate for their need for knowledge outside of school. As the stakeholders in their sexual lives, they develop strategies to actively deal with the sexual situations, knowledge deficits and challenges relevant to them. Obviously, such strategies require resources; to acquire sexual agency, they use whatever is subjectively accessible to young people and appears meaningful, be it offers of support from religious authorities or contacts from a queer youth centre. Although, from the young people’s perspective, such nonformal and informal places of sexual education appear to be superior to the deficient school-based knowledge transfer, it remains an open question as to which restrictions become virulent in communication with (sexuality-) educational laypersons and how young people can deal with their issues, conflicts, challenges and concerns in these settings. 

In the second example, one can summarise the narratives of the interviewees as self-positioning actors who are insecure about their sexual lifestyle. Such biographical narratives are characterised by explications of sometimes considerable uncertainty regarding sexuality-related challenges and conflicts as well as the experience of low self-efficacy in their sexual lifestyle. For example, Phillip, 20 years old at the time of the interview, who describes himself as heterosexual and a recent high school graduate, reports massive insecurities when describing his most concise memories of sexuality education: “And then there was also this point where you were a bit afraid, you know, of this AIDS thing, because that’s what they told us in seventh grade. But then it wasn’t even discussed in any great detail – you just become terminally ill, something like that [...] So, this AIDS scare hovers over the sexuality education lessons.” (Philipp, 20, heterosexual, secondary school) Philipp feels very insecure because of what he perceives as the inadequate treatment of the topics of HIV and AIDS. For him, not only does this topic overshadow the entire sexuality education programme, it obviously continues to haunt him outside the classroom, for example, when he recalls his “first time": “Oh God, you can get sick from it now, and you also have to be careful not to have a baby." 

Such experiences of insecurity arise from the abbreviated thematisation of sexuality education content. They correspond to differential markers of difference, experiences of othering, disregard at school and, in the context of sexuality education at school, with irritations and insecurities nonheterosexual young people are increasingly reporting. Anja, for example, 20 years old at the time of the interview, describes herself as bisexual and having attended a comprehensive school and talks about her experiences in the context of sexuality education at school: “That was the time when my classmates started calling me a lesbian, and then they said, ’OK, there’s something else besides the norm, girls can fall in love with girls and boys with boys. Game over, that was that, there was nothing more to say.’ But from the beginning, it was suggested that homosexuality is somehow wrong ... I was totally confused because I thought, ’Hey, why is that a bad thing now?’” (Anja, 20, bisexual, comprehensive school) Anja’s story about her experience of the thematisation of sexuality at school reveals how specific and selective forms of sexual constructions of normality and differential markers can interact. Her classmates personally labelled Anja as a lesbian, and her sexual orientation is discriminated against as deviating from the norm of school-based sexuality education. She experiences school sexuality education as reproducing the discrimination she experiences from her classmates, which makes her feel very insecure. 

In a nutshell, the biographical narratives show, first, that school sexuality education is recalled as something between subjectively meaningless, biologically truncated and lastingly shameful. Second, it also becomes evident that young people must face the consequences of sexuality education at school experienced in this way with their own coping strategies and resources. Third, sexuality education at school apparently does little to strengthen the sexual agency of its recipients and provide them with such resources and “life-serving knowledge” (Bonfadelli 1998) they experience as supportive. Instead, young people must acquire sexual agency on their own by explicitly differentiating themselves from deficient sexual education and working through the corresponding experiences of discrepancy and difference. Both reconstructable patterns of how they experience and deal with sexuality education and sexuality-related communication at school reveal significant challenges at the interface of official school, social and sexuality education formats. It may prove helpful to refer to the classic description of “life-serving knowledge” introduced many years ago by Heinz Bonfadelli (1994) in the educational science debate on knowledge gaps and social inequality. There are likely few subject areas as sexuality-related issues that have greater subjective relevance for young people – at least temporarily – who are working hard to establish a suitable sexual lifeplan and acquire sexual agency. Here, their need for multidimensional factual knowledge merges with their need for orientation and reflective knowledge to deal with the diverse standardisations of sexuality in this interplay and to gradually experience themselves as sexually capable in their own lives. The attempts in educational institutions – and therefore also in the context of sexuality education in schools – to guarantee autonomy are intertwined with normalising control functions. At the same time, such goals and content remain linked to normative interpretations, judgements and evaluations. Questions about what should be dealt with educationally and in what form depend on social and professional definition processes. Presently, the voice of the addressees still seems to be heard very rarely, although they are also the ones expected to cope with the deficits of sexuality education in schools. They are thrown back on their own resources regarding the coping strategies available to them. If sexuality education in schools aims to ensure the autonomy of young people’s lives, this goal also demands addressing the institutional, social and personal prerequisites for human well-being and human development regarding sexuality-related issues. One could start with a systematic examination of the question of the extent to which sexuality education at school could be better organised to benefit the lives of its addressees. 

¹In the exploratory study, heterogeneously positioned young adults between the ages of 18 and 21 were initially interviewed retrospectively using biographical-narrative interviews (Schütze, 1987). This was followed by further eight group discussions, which were then analysed as part of a dissertation on the reconstruction of sexual socialisation processes of young adults using the documentary method (Bohnsack, 2021; Schweitzer, 2023).