Sexuality education in South African schools: deconstructing the dominant response to young people's sexualities in contemporary schooling contexts

South African schools are tasked with providing sexuality education through the Life Orientation curriculum as a means of challenging continued high rates of HIV, unwanted pregnancy and gender-based violence. While in theory schools are well positioned to provide appropriate knowledge for reproductive health and navigating sexual challenges within a gender justice framework, research on sexuality education in South African schools indicates that this is not the reality in practice. This paper draws on a growing body of qualitative studies, with both educators and learners in South African schools, to understand the issues undermining the goal of a critical and social justice pedagogy of sexuality in Life Orientation classrooms. We argue that sexuality education has been deployed to regulate and discipline young sexualities, reinforce and perpetuate gender binarisms and heteronormativity, re-establish global northern family values of the nuclear family within a pro-family discourse, and represent continued assumptions of adult authority in a civilising mission over young people. We suggest that the failure to make critical use of Life Orientation is linked to the dominance of 'expert'-based didactic pedagogy, and argue the possibilities of sexuality education as a productive space for young people's active participation and agency in making meaning of gender and sexualities.