From traditional school health to the emerging Multi-Agency Health and Family Life Education Programme - The transference of an identity crisis created at the macro level

Abstract

The thesis that informs this report is an examination of the current school-based Health and Family Life Education (HFLE) programme in Grenada. In keeping with education reforms, the Caribbean region has been experiencing a gradual moving away, since the 1970s, from the traditional School Health Education programme to a more comprehensive approach. There have been two sets of significant shifts in Grenada's traditional School Health Education to more comprehensive approaches between 1988 and 1997. This report, which embodies the subsection of the thesis dealing with participants' experiences of the new School Health curriculum, identifies and discusses a form of identity crisis that seems to have been created at the time of the development of the Family Life Education (FLE) curriculum at the macro level, and has subsequently been transferred to the micro level in the shift from traditional School Health Education to the emerging HFLE. The paper looks particularly at how participants associate FLE with the teaching of sex education and how that perception has affected the current School Health Education-essentially a case of guilt by association