Wisonsin v. Yoder. Amish needn’t school their kids past 8th grade. Algebra isn’t typically taught until the 9th. But beyond that, most states allow home schooling with no, or little regulation as to the content.
They can pull their kids out of public schools altogether an homeschool them.
Pffft. Shooting up a classroom is not what guns are typically used for. Sex is sex. Some parents want their kids to have abstinence only sex ed. It’s stupid philosophy, if you ask me, but we allow a wide range of latitude in the way parents can raise their kids.
Er. That’s not really the right framing of the question:
Suppose I could teach algebra to my child, and do as good (or better) a job as the school-classroom. And suppose also that I felt that the school classroom method was teaching other things besides algebra…such as poor self-image. Okay, that’s not a very good parallel, but we’re stuck with it.
Why should I, as a parent, NOT teach algebra at home, provided I could teach the same information? Isn’t knowledge-acquisition the POINT? Why must it be provided in a roomful of people, where embarrassment and humiliation may well occur in the most public way possible?
I remember sex-ed classes in school. More to the point, I remember educating myself from medical books (Reader’s Digest sort) on the family book case. My mother never said a word to me, and my father said things I wish he hadn’t. I could probably have done just as well with the Reader’s Digest book, to be honest. And no classful of people staring at me if I asked (what they thought was) a ‘stupid’ question.
Oh come on, you know I used algebra as an example. You’re being facetious, and in any case algebra is certainly taught prior to the 9th grade. It doesn’t take 8 years to pick up on long division or Venn diagrams.
Sex with minors isn’t typically what a penis is used for either. What’s your point?
But the principle holds. The state can require students to learn the basics-- reading, writing, math, etc. That is what that SCOTUS case is about, and how it was decided. Sex ed can’t reasonably be lumped in with “the basics”. People can have legitimate religious reasons (in the eyes of the state) for not wanting their kids to learn anything beyond abstinence. Hell, every Catholic in the country could claim that if they wanted.
You’re being obtuse. Sex ed teaches about sex, not how to take a leak. And it’s taught to minors. It’s teaching them something that if they do it in any way shape or form, it is illegal. There are many uses for firearms that are legal even when done by minors.
It’s not necessarily illegal for minors to have sex. Doesn’t it depend on the age (of both parties involved) and the state they’re in? If the age of consent is sixteen, then two sixteen year old minors having sex aren’t breaking the law.
Yes. I should have said below the age of consent, which is often not the same as the age of majority. Anyway, this is kind of a hijack of this thread. I was originally trying to get at information about how sex education (or lack thereof) affects the rate of STDs in teens. It doesn’t appear to make much difference in the US. So, while I agree that sex education is a good thing, I’m not sure you can say we have to make sure it’s available in order to lessen the rate of STD infection.
No offense, but I do get tired of this sex/violence meme. It’s a false equivalency. Young people (hell, most people ) are powerfully driven hormonally to have sex. They are not powerfully driven hormonally to shoot people.
I have no doubt that if a roomful of young adolescent virgins with little knowledge of sex were shown an explicit movie of a couple of attractive people having sex, and another group of adolescent virgins were shown your typical action movie with lots of killing and gunfire, the kids watching the sex movie would be much more likely to attempt intercourse in the near future than the kids watching the shoot-'em-ups would be to try to obtain a weapon and shoot someone.
Thus, when you describe sexual activity in an environment in which it appears to be either approved of or at least tolerated as being inevitable, it only encourages behavior for which there’s a strong built-in desire anyway.
So, we arrive at the conundrum that we have now. Abstinence-only and/or home schooling in regard to sex don’t work to prevent STDs and pregnancies, and sex education in school doesn’t seem to work very effectively either for the many reasons brought up in this very thread…and it may in fact only serve to launch kids into sexual behavior at an earlier age than would have been the case otherwise.
As to the solution, and given American society as it exists today (see lobotomyboy63’s post above), I got nothin’.
I’m sorry, is there a significant segment of the population that never has sex? I was under the impression that for the vast majority of the world, sex IS inevitable.
But if it’s so built in, I doubt seeing a sexy movie will make people want sex more. I mean, if we’re talking about teens, I doubt hearing about sex will make them have it–a willing partner and available back seat of [insert popular make of car] will probably make them more likely to attempt sex.
I was essentially trying to point out the fallacy in the notion that kids will be no more likely to have sex than shoot someone once they’ve been taught the necessary mechanics.
And yes, kids will experiment in the back of cars. But IMO they will be much more likely to do so, and in greater numbers and at an earlier age, if they’re being exposed to specific details as to how to go about it and with the seemingly tacit approval of the adults who are teaching them about it.
As both lobotomyboy63 and I have experienced, there once was a time in this country when teen pregnancies and STD rates (and just the percentage of kids having sex) were far below those that exist now and kids had just as much access to automobiles then as they do now. This change didn’t just come from out of nowhere. Parental guidance isn’t what it used to be, censorship and acceptable standards aren’t what they used to be, sex education is far more explicit than it used to be, and sexual activity isn’t frowned on like it used to be.
There are those who think this is all well and good, and to a certain extent I would agree. But as I’ve seen time and again over the years, when you lessen or eliminate one set of problems you invariably create others, and the current rate of STD’s and teen pregnancies is the predictable result of these changes in societal norms.
I had a course in psych called “Human Sexuality” and the teacher talked about a study Richard Nixon had commissioned. I’m thinking it was the Hunt Report or the Hunt Commission, but this was not the Hunt that was involved in Watergate.
Tricky Dick was a prude and hoped to prove that sex on TV caused a boatload of sex crimes or other social ills, that kids see this and grow up to emulate it. The study concluded that no, kids don’t “act out” when they see romance etc. on TV. They do, however, often act out violence.
Nixon didn’t like the conclusions and suppressed it.
I think HPV “doesn’t really count” because upwards of 90% of women in this country can have it and a significant percentage don’t even know they have it.
I wondered about Starving’s comment, whether birthrates were actually lower in the past. I go back to my one course in Human Sexuality. The teacher said that figures on sexuality seem to be constant across time. For instance, the %age of a population that’s homosexual or the incidence of adultery was about the same in 1950 or 1850 or 1750. OTOH how much a society is willing to talk about it etc. is a very different thing.
Abortions are available now; they weren’t pre-Roe v. Wade. Your first cite contains some abortion figures; your second cite doesn’t. If pregnancies are down but STD’s are up, it sounds like the kids are using birth control.
And, returning to the post I made about the nuclear family: my mother was a pregnant teenager in 1941. Neither she nor my father finished school. My father fought in WWII. They had both already gone through the Depression. They married, raised ten kids…their generation’s attitude about responsibility was a far cry from that of most teenagers you find today.
Zackly. As I understand it though, AIDS literally didn’t exist in the 1950s so if the classics like syphilis weren’t enough, we’re dealing with more STDs than before.
I’m very guilty of the “glance by” on data such as those pdfs. Interpreting research makes my head hurt and you just know there are academics who question the validity of the study, the methods of obtaining data, etc., and possibly a contradictory study somewhere. There’s always the Mark Twain “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” aspect of it all, besides.
A very interesting read, which I may have posted before, is Helen Fisher’s “Anatomy of Love.” It’s an anthropological take on a lot of issues surrounding sex.
IIRC she thinks we’re wired to start having sex before we’re even capable of reproducing…there’s a sort of window of experimentation that nature provides. So, big surprise, we have a drive for nookie that appears early and why do we think kids will abstain?
Stated another way, one of my favorite bombs to drop on my students is to ask the girls what their first toy was. Many say, “A doll.” See, they just cleared the womb and they already want a baby of their own.
As a non-parent, I will say that I got a shock back in 99-01 when I took a job at a middle school instead of high school. If some of those sixth-grade girls had been in my sixth grade class, I wouldn’t have learned a single thing.
It is astounding how fast kids are developing physically these days. Some say it’s the steroids in our food. Some say it’s because we’ve circumvented some childhood diseases that delay puberty. Some say it’s the increase in body fat content. “Some”=other teachers I asked, btw. All I know is: holy shit!
They held some dances after school. Of course some sixth grade boys were dancing cheek to knee with the sixth grade girls. But (I am told) the teachers had to break up some dirty dancing. Dirty=girl stands in front of boy, girl bends over, boy grabs her by the hips and humps her. :eek:
I stand corrected as well, and frankly I hadn’t paid that much attention to the teen pregnancy rate over the years. My impression of it as a significant problem currently came from reading this thread.
But note that it’s really the out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy rate that is really important. People used to get married much earlier in the 50s and 60s, and your last cite notes exactly that.
) are powerfully driven hormonally to have sex. They are not powerfully driven hormonally to shoot people.
