Not only do I smell a troll…it’s not even a particulary coherent one.
And more frighteningly, Torch Light’s profession is listed as “Teacher.”
December:
But what’s to imply disapproval in the first place? And why should students be taught something to “offset” something else they are being taught? Can’t we arrive at a consensus on a set of sexual ethics that is reasonable and then teach that?
Young people’s personal lives should not be a political battleground.
Manda JO:
Encouraging kids to wait until they’re 18, wait unitl they’re in a relationship, and wait until they’ve gotten ahold of some contraceptive is precisely what we should do. Does any school do that? Or are they either too strict or too vague?
I don’t think that most accidental pregnancies are the result of the boinkers having ‘forgot’ to use birth control. Sex isn’t some dull routine like going to school in the morning, where you’re liable to forget things. A sexual encounter is a big deal and people spend a lot of time pondering the ins and outs of the old in-out. I think that many young people are reluctant to acquire contraceptives because there are still a lot residual messages out there that make them embarrassed at the thought of stepping up the counter at the pharmacy.
I think this is hogwash. Any “safe sex” instruction is going to include abstinence as one of the options…in fact the most surefire option…to avoid pregnancy and STDs. There is no big debate out there between those who want to include abstinence among the “safe sex” options discussed and those who don’t. The argument is between those who want to only discuss this option and those who want to discuss all options.
This is exactly my bitch: I don’t think anyone is preaching “wait til you’re eighteen!”, which seems so fucking logical to me. It’s all either “No sex til marrige!!” or “Hell, their gonna do it anyway, just encourage them to use birthcontrol.” No program I have seen seems to stress that there might be value to waiting a while, but not forever.
Nor is anyone stressing the “technical virgin” status that I, for one, think is a damn good idea if you have raging hormones, but I can understand why that is not possible: I can see that some parents would react poorly to a banner that shouted “Stick to Blow jobs, for God’s sake!”
I am going to disagree wiht you here, though I don’t have any statistics to back me up. For a teen couple who have been having sex regularly for three or six months, taking hte pill has gotten to be routine, and I think that kids are at least as likely to forget to take a pill as an adult. Furthermore, the “it can’t happen to me” factor is never stronger than at that age, so teens are perhaps lest likely to take approprite steps after they have forgotten a pill or two.
Morals of our fathers? ROFLMAO! You seem to be under the mistaken impression that our founding fathers were…well…
Look, I suggest you read a bit of history before you hold up the founding fathers as paragons of sexual morality. Here’s a hint–start with Ben Franklin, and move on to Thomas Jefferson.
I absolutely disagree. Schools have no business whatsoever teaching values or morals. Schools are for education, not socialization and indoctrination. The job of imbuing children with morals and values belongs to the PARENTS, and nobody else. No sexual education belongs in schools at ALL, beyond biology. I mean no sex education/condom distribution programs. I equally mean no abstinence course. The government has almost totally violated the domain of the parent, and I for one will not cooperate with any further infringement whatsoever.
This is true as well. But there is a huge difference between making an impression on a child through you example and formalizing value and moral education.
yuck. reminds me of jayjay’s values test!
damned if you lie, damned if you tell the truth!!
i find the idea of these pledges quite offensive, and definitely a “do as i say, not as i do” situation could arise with teachers who are single parents or who live with common-law partners etc.
the only ethical or moral techings that should be encouraged in schools are courtesy, respect for others and above all respect for yourself.
whether the individual then decides that it is in their best interests to be chaste is none of the school’s business.
and i personally feel that in many cases teenagers get pregnant for the same reasons everyone else gets pregnant, they feel that a baby will provide them with unconditional love and a purpose to their lives.
however, convincing them otherwise would be a REAL challenge, compared to making them sign pledges or handing out condoms.
So how do you feel about punishing shildren who are caught cheating on tests, stealing from classmates, or harrassing each other? How is the idea that “Teen age pregnancy is not fair to your child and therefore wrong to risk” any different than the idea that “People should not go out of their way to make another person feel bad and ashamed and humiliated?”
Manda JO:
I don’t have any statistics either and would like to see some, because I remain skeptical that most accidental teenage pregnancies are to girls who were on the pill but forgot to take it. What I’ve noticed is that girls are often willing to surrender to the heat of the moment, but don’t want to admit even to themselves that they had been planning ahead of time to have sex. Girls like to think of themselves as paragons of virtue–albeit with the occasional lapse–but taking birth control pills or having condoms in her purse would be a daily reminder that ‘I’m a slut’.
There’s this tug-of-war between her hormones and cutural forces from religion to peers calling her ‘slut’ that interferes with the rational approach neccessary to prevent pregnancy.
As for guys, there is obviously no ambivilence about having sex, but during a sexual encounter they are often reluctant to ‘rock the boat’ by broaching the issue of pregnancy risks. (Some guys just don’t like to wear condoms, but dude, it sure beats a poke in the, uh, a poke in the hand). 
I don’t think we really have an either/or situation: some million teenage girls a year get pregnant, and I don’t think that it is unreasonable to assume that there are many different reasonas and stories. I’m sure that some teenage girls get pregnant because they only allow themselves to be "swept’ away. However, I knew personally several teenage girls who were having sex without any real fears of being called “sluts.” Most of them had some sort of birth control plan, but it wasn’t always uesed effectively. Considering that many adults are sloppy with birth control, (the FDA gives the “optimal” and the “actual” sucess rate of each form of BC for a reason) I don’t think it is unreasonable to assume that even teens with both the knowledge and means for birth control will make mistakes.
Cheating on tests: Directly related to education, so suspension, along with a score of zero on the test. Any further punishment is up to the parents.
Harassment: Call the parents.
Teenage pregnancy vs. making other people feel bad: None of the school’s business. Teaching values and morals is the parent’s domain, not the school. Schools are for teaching skills and knowledge, not how to be a good person.
If a kid is disrupting the educational process, then he/she needs to be removed. Period. That is the extent of disciplinary action that should be taken by the school.
Why the hell do you think kids are graduating without knowing how to read or add? Because the schools spend too much time trying to teach them how to live instead of teaching the skills they need to be able to get a job. Kids already have parents. The government and the schools have no business trying to be additional ones, or even worse, taking the place of the actual ones.
I’ve worked as research assistant for 3 years for a professor writing a book on sex education. Here’s what I’ve learned.
The roots of the current controversy over abstinence-only education go back to the Reagan Administration when Congress passed the American Family Life Act, which included a provision for funding sex education that stressed abstinence and refrained from discussing contraception. The law was challenged in the courts for violation of the separation of church and state, because in practice the funds were going to conservative religious organizations who occasionally included their own doctrine in sex ed programs intended for public schools. The litigation was not resolved until the Clinton Administration. When the dust finally settled, the court ruled that the American Family Life Act, which had elapsed by then, was implemented unconstitutionally, but the law itself was not unconstitutional on its face. The ruling proved to be a hidden boon for religious conservatives, because it provided basic guidelines for how they could contribute to writing abstinence-only sex ed programs without violating church/state separation. By 1996, Congress appropriated $50 million in funding for abstinence-only education by tacking it on as a rider to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, a.k.a. the 1996 welfare reform bill.
You can see the funding provisions for abstinence-only education in the welfare reform bill here:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c104:1:./temp/~c104p6IUDK:e791565:
A lot of research remains to be done about the comparative effectiveness of abstinence-only vs. more comprehensive forms of education that discuss contraception, but so far there is not a single published study with a solid methodological foundation that proves that abstinence-only sex education delays onset of sexual activity, reduces frequency of sexual activity, or reduces the number of partners that adolescents have. I make this statement based on a report called Emerging Answers, a comprehensive review of sex education research done by Douglas Kirby for the National Council for the Prevention of Teen Pregnancy.
You can find the report summarized here.
http://www.teenpregnancy.org/resources/data/report_summaries/no_easy_answers/SumKey.asp
The report concludes:
Even though abstinence-only programs may be appropriate for many youths, especially junior high and middle school youths, there does not currently exist any published scientific research demonstrating that they have actually delayed (or hastened) the onset of sexual intercourse or reduced any other measure of sexual activity. Thus, at the present time, it is not known whether or not abstinence-only programs delay intercourse.
The summary also states that discussion of contraception in sex education classes has not been proven to increase teenage sexual activity. To focus on the specific topic of chastity pledges, the research I’m familiar with suggests that they’re ineffective. Either the number of students taking the pledge is too small to make a dent or so many students take the pledge solely to go along with the crowd that the pledge becomes meaningless. In addition, it’s certainly possible that some students who do sign a chastity pledge probably would have stayed chaste anyway, even if there had been no pledge. In order to prove that a written pledge of chastity is effective, you have to prove that the pledge would make people abstain from sex who would have been sexually active if they hadn’t had the pledge. Hope this is informative.
Sincerely,
Jon P.
It might add new meaning to the phrase “getting the belt”.
baDOOMkssh
I’d like to cheer my health teacher Mr. Lynn for skipping the section in the health book on the societal of us boinking each other and concentrating on the economic and health issues. In particular, he left the girls in the class with the impression that us guys would particularly enjoy the oppertunity to violate their bodies and give them lasting physical problems in our never-ending quest to Get Our Guns Off™, and the guys that girls would jump at the oppertunity to get pregnant by “forgetting” their contraceptive of choice and leaving us paying child support for the rest of our lives. Nice guy. On the other hand, a large percentage of the class (both guys and girls) was ready to admit that they had been boinking happily for a while now, with little negative effect, ruining most of the effect of the lesson.
Question: why can’t we let teen parents ruin their lives and starve to death attempting to support their external parasites, as nature intended?
One is subjective, the other is objective. Being a teenager doesn’t necessarily make you a bad mother, and if you take the necessary precautions, the chances of actually becoming pregnant are very slim.
OTOH, if you are going out of your way to humiliate someone, there’s a clear victim, and humiliating him is an intended consequence of your actions.
If you’re looking for an analogy for teenage sex, try snowboarding. There’s a very real chance you may get injured on the slopes, or injure someone else. But that’s why you wear protection and learn about safety measures… so you can prevent anyone from getting hurt.
Not necessarily, but children having children is considered am enormous problem in the US today. E.g., see http://www.intermedia-inc.com/TE02.htm
http://www.ctrlaltesc.org/teenpreg/00/12/21/067220.shtml
http://lib.nmsu.edu/resources/ziadocs/socwk.html
But don’t we reognize that it is diffucult for children to appriciate the risks of snowboarding ,and thus limit their freedome to snowboard based on their age? I wouldn’t let my (hypothetical) twelve year old go snowboarding unsupervised, because i wouldn’t trust him not to make careless errors: I wouldn’t let my sixteen year old go snowboarding just anywhere unsupervised, but would instead put limits on where he was allowed to go, and with whom. Again, because I wouldn’t trust him to use good judgement about that triple black-diamond slope (or however snowboarding is ranked).
Since 1)the consequnces of careless sex are quite possibly more severe, and are more likely to involve a third party, 2)since sex is something which notoriously inspires poor judgement in even very smart adults and since 3) sex is something which our society dosen’t really do under direct supervision, I think it is reasonable to stringly suggest that kids refrain from genetal intercourse until they are legal adults.
To summarize, I don’t see how suggesting a child to stick to oral and mannuel sex until they are legal adults in a sex ed class is any diferent from suggesting a child to drive on surface roads only until they have some arbitrary amount of driving experience. in driver’s ed class.
We also recognize that there comes a time when kids can judge for themselves whether that black-diamond slope is within their abilities. And because some kids will misjudge but still go snowboarding anyway, it’s best to start with safety lessons from the beginning, rather than telling them “promise me you won’t go up to 49 Degrees with your friends until you’re 18” and leaving it there.
Are any sex ed classes doing that?
I have no problem with an instructor saying “here are the dangers of unprotected sex, here’s how you can prevent them, but please wait until you’re older,” where the facts are presented without bias and the teacher says “based on these facts, because of these risks, the safest thing to do is wait.”
But my understanding is that in schools with these chastity programs, the students are held to some kind of standard, and students who fail to keep their ‘vows’ (or don’t take the vows in the first place) will attract suspicion, pressure, or punishment. Is that correct?
Even if the contract is given out as something for kids to look over for themselves, and is never returned to the school or brought up again, I still don’t think the school should be implying a ‘correct’ answer to subjective moral questions.
Maybe if they provided an opposing viewpoint… “I promise to make my own decisions about sex, drugs, and alcohol. I realize that although my friends, parents, teachers, and other authorities may try to persuade me one way or the other, what I do with my body is up to me. I will not be pressured into action or scared into inaction.”
(Side note: That was the subject of my 6th grade DARE essay. Guess who was the only kid in class to fail DARE? ;))