Li Zhaoqing (www.rednet.cn): China has become more open in many aspects during the 30 years of reform and opening up, but sex remains one of the few topics people refrain from talking about in public. Primary and even middle school students receive next to no sex education, except the limited basic knowledge in their biology textbooks.

However, adolescents are curious about their bodies and want to know more about the changes happening to them during puberty. Driven by this curiosity, some of them engage in relations with their peers without taking proper precautions, which can lead to unintended consequences including disease and pregnancy.

If they are informed about their bodies and the changes they are going through, will such incidents diminish? We cannot expect such things to stop completely, but at least young students will know the risk. They'll know sex can result in babies. They themselves are still minors, who live on their parents' support, so how can they afford to support their own children? Sexual relations must be restricted within the framework of marriage and should not be something between two young school students.

It's great to see the introduction of the human physiological make-up and the changes during puberty in the new textbooks in Wuhan. It's necessary to give such lessons in primary schools to enhance their awareness of how to protect themselves, particularly for girls.

Also, students will know how they came into the world, instead of being tricked by their parents with stories that they were found in a dust bin on the streets and then taken back home. Those who don't believe their parents' stories may try to find out the answers by themselves and the information they get may be misleading.

Liu Guoqiang (www.chinanews.com): Sex is a normal physiological and psychological phenomenon, but sex-related knowledge is not easily acquired through instinct. Sex education is thus necessary and should not be discriminated against.

Children see sex in a different way from adults. While adults debate on whether the sex textbook is too "straightforward," young students do need such a textbook to clear their doubts and confusions about sex. If the class is given in a secretive way, the children will not understand it. Some people consider any direct depiction of sex-related things to be too straightforward, which they believe risks destroying children's puerility. However, primary school is an important period for students' sex education. Statistics from countries where sex education is well-conducted among children show sharp drops in premarital pregnancy and adolescents' sex-related crime rates.

Indeed, sex education should be done in a proper way that is suitable for children's psychological features, but it does not mean "conservative methods."

Exercising prudence

Chen Mo (Xinhua Blog): Once physical development begins, pictures can easily spark young students' libidos. These new sex education textbooks in Wuhan put a number of such pictures in front of the students, in the hope of conducting effective sex education.

However, such a direct form of sex education will, instead of guiding students toward the right direction, encourage them to think more about sex and even risk sexual behavior. It's quite possible that compilers forgot that something is still forbidden to children when it comes to sex.

While some people are worried about the lack of understanding among students, in real life, rarely do we see a young person that knows nothing about sex at all. They have easy access to the Internet, where they can find almost everything about that subject.

It's great that early-age sex education is now being stressed in primary schools in Wuhan, but if sex education is not done carefully, we might get what's opposite to what we want. Probably, it will be more dangerous to tell them about sex in such a straightforward manner than to keep them under-informed.