Lads and lassies, it’s time for The Talk.

The terrible Irish cliché aside, in honor of this week’s Sex Edition I did some research into how the Irish sex education system compares to our own.

Speaking with the Department of Education and Skills for Ireland helped me understand how the curriculum is set up for schools in the country. The entire program is split into three cycles, covered in primary and post-primary school, said Miriam Langtry, who works in Corporate Services at the Department of Education and Skills.

Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) is part of a curriculum known as Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE). SPHE is applied in primary schools and the junior cycle of post-primary schools. RSE is a stand-alone requirement in the senior cycle of post-primary teaching, Langtry said.

At the primary level, the program focuses on promoting personal development and well-being of the individual child. The lessons in the curriculum are built around themes such as self-confidence, making decisions and handling conflict, including bullying.

The themes continue in the junior cycle, Langtry said. RSE comes to play a bigger role now to focus on hygiene, puberty, resistance to peer pressure and reproduction. Other topics include teenage pregnancy, the implications of sexual activity and misconceptions about homosexuality. Earlier last year, gay marriage finally became legal in Ireland.

Finally, in the senior cycle, there is in-depth coverage of concepts such as contraception, family planning, sexually transmitted diseases and sexual abuse and assault.

I remember bits and pieces of the sex ed class I had to take for only a few days in middle school. Although I was a little more mature than my classmates, I wasn’t exactly psyched to see drawings of scrotums either.

U.S. middle school sexual education, based on my personal experience, seemed to be more of a “here’s what’s happening to your body and why” kind of thing. Being single, it was all I really needed to know.

The sexual side came in more with a required high school health class. This is where high school students learned all about protection against STDs and HIV/AIDS. That certainly wasn’t all we learned but that’s most of what I remember.

Comparing the two systems, I feel the Irish sexual education curriculum focuses on developing children’s sense of relationships, aiding them in decision-making along with the typical topics like the dangers of unsafe sex.

It seems that in the U.S., we learn about how relationships work by looking at the ones we create with our family members and friends. And sex education is limited to an instruction manual about puberty and hormones.

Meanwhile, the lesson plans for primary school SPHE in Ireland are specifically geared toward enhancing self-image in children. This is not to say U.S. teachers don’t promote the same thing, however I did not experience this as a formal part of the curriculum.

The entire program for Irish schools encourages the building of healthy relationships, whereas the most I remember from my sex education programs involved consent and condoms.