** Wendy Shalit, a 23-year-old author ** , argues that the best sex education for children is ** no sex education at all ** . I've been through sex education classes myself, and I agree with her position. After all I'm pretty certain nobody taught my parents anything about sex, and they had me. The same can be said for others born in earlier generations - they didn't seem to require instruction manuals, and they were also effective in avoiding harm (sexually transmitted disease, early pregnancy, rape). I think Shalit makes a pretty strong case. It's a bit long but worth the read.
"All across North America sex education instructors are doling out ammunition under the banner of enlightenment.
Sex education instructors in Massachusetts, New York and Toronto teach kids "Condom Line-Up", where boys and girls are given pieces of cardboard to describe sex with a condom, such as "sexual arousal," "erection", "leave room at tip," and than kids have to arrange themselves in the proper sequence.
New Jersey's Family Life program begins its instruction about birth control, masturbation, abortion, and puberty in kindergarten. Ten years ago, when the program was first instituted there was some discomfort because according to the coordinator of the program, Claire Scholz, "some of our kindergarten teachers were shy - they didn't like talking about scrotums and vulvas." But in time, she reports, "they tell me its not different from talking about an elbow." In another Sex-Ed class in Colorado, all the girls were told to pick a boy in the class and practice putting a condom on his finger. Schools in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, get a head start on AIDS instruction, teaching it in second grade, four years earlier than state requirements. In Orange Country, Florida, second graders are taught about birth, death, and drug abuse and sixth graders role play appropriate ways of showing affection. "I think that's too young," said one parent Steve Smith. He would prefer his kids to "be learning about reading and writing." New York City Board of Education guidelines instruct that kindergartners are to be taught "the difference between transmissible and non-transmissible diseases; the terms HIV and AIDS; [and] that AIDS is hard to get." This we are informed fulfills "New York State Learner Outcomes: 1,2."
And yet, as they confidently promote all this early sex education, our school officials are at loss when it comes to dealing with the new problem of sodomy-on-the-playground. Its hard to keep up with all the sexual assault cases that plague our public schools in any given month. Take just one reported in the New York Daily News in 1997:
- "Four Bronx boys - the oldest 9 - ganged up on a 9 year old class mate and sexually assaulted her in a schoolyard, police charged yesterday...[The girls mother] said she is furious with Principal Anthony Padilla, who yesterday told parents the attack never happened...The girls parents and sisters are also outraged that when the traumatized third grader told a teacher, she was merely advised to wash out her mouth and was given a towel wipe." *
The associated link between the disenchanting of sex and increased sexual brutality among children works like this: if our children are raised to believe, in the words of that New Jersey kindergarten teacher, that talking about the most private things is "no different from talking about an elbow," then they are that much more likely to see nothing wrong in certain kinds of sexual violence. What's really so terrible, after all, in making someone touch or kiss your elbow?
At my school sex education was given in kindergarten to ninth grade, but I was excused from fourth grad on. The first time I was conscious of any real sexual desire was the summer after ninth grade, about age fourteen or so. One shouldn't extrapolate from my own case, which may be abnormal, but generally speaking I'm struck by the way my generations sex education ended around the time that natural desire usually begins. I guess the theory is that this way we know everything before we start, and can do it properly, but I think what happens instead is that we end up starting before we feel, because we think its expected of us. Usually when adults start shoving condoms in our faces, we would much prefer to giggle...
The natural embarrassment sex education seeks so prissily to erode - "Now remember, boys and girls, there is absolutely nothing to giggle about!" - may point to a far richer understanding of sex than do our most explicit sex manuals. Children now are urged to overcome their "inhibitions" before they have a clue what an inhibition means. Yet embarrassment is actually a wonderful thing signaling that something very strange or very significant is going on, that some boundary is being threatened - either by you or by others. Without embarrassment kids are weaker: more vulnerable to pregnancy, disease and heartbreak...
...The few studies that show that instruction on condom use changes the behavior of students conclude it is only likely to make them more sexually active. This cult of taking responsibility for your sexuality is essentially a call to action...
Its really not very complicated why so many kids are getting pregnant these days, now that we have so much sex education on top of a wholly sexualized culture. It's because sex is not a big deal to them and because they think this is what they are expected to do. They are just trying to be normal kids, to please people...and prove that they are "sexually healthy."
Were not flocking to Jane Austen movies because we want the facts, but because we're sick of having the facts shoved in our faces all the time. One is entitled to imagine that there might be something more to hope for than all this dreary crudeness - this view of sex as something autonomous and cut off from obligation, weather familial obligation or obligation to one's 'sex partner' (as the locution has it).
So in a funny way, the facts about sex conceal the truth." (Wendy Shalit)
Achtung ;)
Today 75% of American teens have sex before high school graduation.
In New York 54,000 teens, ages 15-19 become pregnant each year.
A 1994 Rhode Island survey of teenagers asked whether a man has the right to have sexual intercourse with a woman without her consent, 80% said its ok if the couple were married, 70% said its ok if they planned on getting married, 61% said its ok if the couple had prior sexual relations, and 65% of boys said its acceptable to 'force sex' on a person after dating 6 months, 25% of boys said its ok to force sex on a date, if you've spent money on her. * Has sex education failed these teenagers, if you asked another generations teenagers the same questions how would they answer * , I wonder...