Sex Ed-less
There is all sorts of huzzah-ing about an abstinence-only program that has somehow been construed to suggest that such teaching actually works. Well of course it works. On a handful of children, and good for them. But to extrapolate that the approach will be successful with many others is hogwash.
This study was done in black middle school in Philadelphia. A husband-and-wife research "team" randomly assigned 662 students from the sixth and seventh grade to four different programs which ranged from just health care to safe-sex, with abstinence-only and abstinence with safe sex in between. So we’re talking about 165 eleven- and twelve-year-olds in each group.
(Let’s pause to refresh for a moment, I may have been severely retarded in my sexual development, but I was clueless about sex at that age, and for several years thereafter, and that was without any instruction. Yes, it was a different world. Television was barely (sic) on the scene, movies were much cleaner, and we didn’t have video games and the Internet.)
Back to the study, after two years, according to what the students told the researchers, only a third of the abstinence-only had engaged in sexual intercourse, while half of the just-health-care-without-sex-ed had had sex. So 27 early teens in an apples-‘n-oranges study are supposed to guide the nation about sex education? Puh-leeze.
First, parents have to teach their children about how their bodies work, about human sexuality, teen urges, as well as about restraint, reputation and dignity. Second, since parents aren’t doing their jobs, the schools – which are supposed to protect society from inept parenting – need to inform the next generation so that the following generation doesn’t arrive too quickly.
Sex is a marvelous scheme. We wouldn’t be here without it. But for too long we have kept the full story about it in the closet, forcing our children to learn from their equally mindless peers and cheesy entertainment. We owe them a better sex education.
©2010 SetonnoteS
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