How to End the War over Sex Ed
Jewels Morris-Davis is a no-nonsense kind of girl. When the high school sophomore turned 16 recently, she didn’t celebrate with any My Super Sweet 16 foolishness. Nor did she rush to get her driver’s license and race around the back roads in this rural northwest corner of South Carolina. But Jewels did quietly revel in one achievement. “I am,” she says a few weeks later, a proud smile spreading across her face, “the first person in my family to reach 16 without getting pregnant–or getting somebody pregnant.”
Shit.
Later this spring, Congress will dive once more into the war over sex education when it decides whether to eliminate $176 million in federal funding for so-called abstinence-only programs, which instruct kids to delay sex until marriage.
Oh gosh. Emotions raging through me…
We now have a pretty good sense of which sex-education approaches work. Substantial research–including a 2007 Bush Administration report–has concluded that comprehensive programs are most effective at changing teen sexual behaviors. They are also largely uncontroversial outside Washington. Vast majorities of parents favor teaching comprehensive sex education. What we haven’t seen is the political will and community investment necessary to educate kids about sexuality and healthy relationships in a truly responsible and honest way.
Wasap wasap. I want to emphasize the coupling of education about sexuality with education about healthy relationships. Elsewhere in this article it referred to a program that teaches all three years of middle school (and beyond). And I firmly agree with this. I’m reminded of the campaign ad against Obama about “teaching kindergarteners about sex” when it was more about appropriate personal space.
Kristen Jordan is not one of those teachers. Walk past her classroom on the first day of sixth grade and you’ll hear her leading the students in an enthusiastic chorus of “Penis! Penis! Penis! Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!” “Until they can use the real names for their body parts without giggling,” she explains, “you can’t talk to them about anything serious.”
If we didn’t have such a taboo around sexuality, if we accepted that for this one everyone actually really does it (and expression varies significantly and all are beautiful if they do not post harm)… if only.
Douglas Kirby, a neutral analyst who has studied sex-education programs for more than three decades, says most evaluations of abstinence-only programs have found “no impact on sexual behavior.” However, nearly half the comprehensive programs that have been studied reduced sexual risk in three areas: delaying the age at which teens first have sex, reducing the number of sexual partners they have and increasing their use of condoms.
What is UP.
While most states and local school districts have policies regarding sex education, very few set standards on how to give students factual information about sex or teach them to develop healthy relationships. Even fewer attempt to evaluate what is covered in the classroom, and 17 states don’t even require sex education to be taught in public schools.
Epic fail of our school system. This is how it goes in most classrooms about most topics.
