From the CDC “The comprehensive sexuality education curriculum should include a variety of topics including anatomy, physiology, families, personal safety, healthy relationships, pregnancy and birth, sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, contraceptives, sexual orientation, pregnancy options, media literacy and more.”
None of that needs to involve teaching anything about “values about sex”.
True but in a subject where values are so prominent and controversial teachers and curriculum writers who could be totally value neutral and just present facts in a disinterested manner are rare as hens teeth.
Speaking of which, I will point you back to what you said:
emphasis mine
Correlation, causation, etc.
So 43% found an increase in age of sexual behavior,
29% decreased frequency,
35% decreased number of partners,
48% increased condom use,
45% increased contraceptive use, and
24% decreased pregnancy rates.
That all points to WORKING, if you don’t use shitty numbers and dishonest tactics. Instead of crying, “THROW IT ALL OUT!”, why not ask “What caused the differences in results, and how can we do better?”
Oh, and a cite that uses a majority of studies from sub-Saharan Africa to say full education doesn’t work using prevalance of HIV infection seems a bit…inapplicable? Disingenuous?
No it doesn’t, in order to avoid data mining you have to look at the outcomes one by one. The state purpose of sex education is to prevent pregancies. In 76% of studies it failed. That means it was a failure at its stated purpose. Illustrative cartoon
There is not one measure where the majority of studies found that is worked. The only conclusion to be drawn is that it does not work. Sex education has been around for decades, and has been found not to work. At this point, why are we throwing good money after bad?
It is? I thought it was to provide information about a “variety of topics including anatomy, physiology, families, personal safety, healthy relationships, pregnancy and birth, sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, contraceptives, sexual orientation, pregnancy options, media literacy and more”
I don’t see “prevent pregnancies” there.
I agree with much of your point here – as someone who works in a school, and does try to teach students to form their own opinions instead of parroting mine. But:
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What constitutes “facts” versus “opinion” – or “fake news” – is inherently contentious. Puddleglum and I probably have very different ideas about what factual objectivity in a classroom includes or excludes. Which of us gets to decide what is a value-neutral approach to sex-ed, or civics?
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I think it’s important to have teachers prepared to present arguments for points of view they don’t personally agree with. Even better, to present devil’s arguments for positions they disagree with. This is pedagogically valuable.
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I don’t think “disinterested” is the attitude to shoot for. These issues are important – if they weren’t, we wouldn’t argue about them. The line I try to walk in a classroom is acknowledging the importance of the issue (and my students’ often strong opinions about it), letting them know I have an opinion (but not saying what it is), and trying to present both sides of the issue as fairly as I can. This is difficult, but the pedagogical value of stimulating critical thinking – teaching kids HOW to think, not WHAT to think – should be our goal in education.
I probably don’t have the background necessary to evaluate this study, however I do see some red flags. 1) Your link goes to a “family-values” sort of site which is likely to have an agenda against sex education and birth control information for teens; 2) all of the studies referenced in this meta-study come from around the world but not in the US, which seems odd to me; and 3) I can’t see from the meta-study itself that birth control information is included in all or even any of the individual studies. Oh yes, and 4) it is quite possible that in the countries studied birth control (such as condoms) is not readily available to teenagers, in which case birth control education would be effectively moot. This would be especially true in the studies in sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin America.
Sex education without birth control information is unlikely to affect the percentage of teen pregnancies, which makes it a straw man argument against sex education with birth control information.
In any case, you have answered my questions regarding your opposition to comprehensive sex education in schools. Thank you for that.
Ew.
And which church should they go to? Only your kind? You’re living in the dark ages if you truly believe that young people should be left to figure sex out on their own rather than learn the facts and be given the knowledge that their sexuality is their own and the power to make sure they know how to prevent STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
I would rather my child not engage in sex too early but I’d much, much rather that he or she didn’t end up also pregnant at 15.
I’m not sure sex ed helps that much anyways at least in terms of preventing unwanted pregnancies. From what I’m seeing of my teenagers is most are too involved in activities to date let alone be in a relationship that leads to sex. Also most are thinking towards college and their future and have the smarts to know an early pregnancy can really hurt those dreams.
So for me, no sex ed program out there can substitute for keeping kids busy and out of trouble which also includes keeping an eye on them. You dont let them alone. Of course the problem is they go to college, their is drinking and drugs involved, and all kinds of things happen.
Maybe it is a good idea to compare with other industrial countries. If I recall correctly the US is pretty much bottom of the pile. With regard to teen pregnancies, teen std’s and the way people view their “first times”. Maybe that’s another bout of American exceptionalism: American teens are just more horny.
Let’s be clear, there were plenty of people having sex when I was in high school here in the Netherlands. I never saw a single pregnant (zero) girl there during all 6 years. I’ve never really heard of any highschool prgenancies either. Maybe they had monthly abortion gatherings:rolleyes:.
That’ll be my only post in this thread. My true feelings sbout “people” like puddlegum would quickly get me banned.
Fucking waiting for the rapture to finally happen.
Well to be honest I heard of very few here in the US either and it was mostly from the inner cities. What their was was kept very quiet.
Thing is sex equals pregnancy and even careful adults can have an accident. I have trouble believing a couple of teenagers fumbling in the backseat can not make a mistake.
As for BC pills even adult women sometimes forget and leave themselves vulnerable so how can one trust a 15 year old who cannot remember her homework?
So because sometimes people make mistakes, all teens should be left with no birth control 
If a couple of teenagers are fumbling in the back seat, I’d rather they both have condoms than cross their fingers!
Open communication with teens should include talks about all kinds of birth control, including pills, abstinence, condoms. Knowledge is power and information lets them make better choices. Their choice might be “no, I’m going to wait till I’m older to have sex”. But if they choose to have sex, let’s at least help them protect themselves against STDs and pregnancy.
It completely blows my mind that in this day and age there are people still thinking that telling kids “no” will work.
In many cases, particularly with more evangelical religious sects, it absolutely is applicable. These people are anti-sex outside of marriage.
Citation needed.
And if the information the parents impart is values-based and wrong, like “sex before marriage ruins you” or “if you wait until you’re married to have sex, you’ll have a better sex life”? It turns out a lot of the information well-meaning religious parents share with their children is really wrong.
This is, as others have pointed out, completely wrong. That’s just one high-profile peer-reviewed study that concluded that abstinence-only sex education increased rates of teen pregnancy. And, by the way? It’s exactly what we’d expect. Teenagers are gonna fuck, whether we teach them how to do it safely or not. And if we don’t, we end up with people who don’t know shit about sex having sex. That’s a problem. You end up with myths like these, and a whole lot more pregnant kids.
Here’s another such study: The impact of abstinence and comprehensive sex and STD/HIV education programs on adolescent sexual behavior | Sexuality Research and Social Policy
It turns out that teenagers are impulsive and seek out sex, but aren’t completely retarded all of the time. If there’s a simple, easy step they can take to not get pregnant, sometimes, they’ll take it. It may not be “responsible” to fuck your way through the whole cheer squad on a 20-pack of Trojans, but it’s a hell of a lot better than doing it without.
To my knowledge there is a massive scientific and medical consensus that abstinence-only sex education is a terrible idea.
Do you think a lack of knowledge about sex, pregnancy, and more will prevent teenagers from trying to have sex?
The OP seems to think he’s made a breakthrough! “Aha,” he thinks, “The antiabortion side is a bunch of hypocrites! If they want fewer abortions, they should be handing out more condoms. They don’t, ergo they’re full of shit.”
It might be a teensy bit more complicated than that.
SUPPOSE that, in 1850, a reasonable, friendly Southerner approached Abe Lincoln or Harriet Beecher Stowe and said "Look here- you don’t like slavery and I understand. To be sure, slavery has always existed in every era and every society and we all know it can never be eradicated. Why don’t we agree that the best thing to do is work together to make slavery less necessary?
"Why don’t we all agree to give Southern farmers subsidies so they can afford to hire workers instead of using so many slaves? And why don’t we give big money to agronomists and technologists? That way, we could develop cash crops that require less labor? We could develop machinery to harvest the cotton instead of slaves?
“If you follow my ideas, why, we could probably reduce slavery by 20% over the next 50 years. Surely, we can all get behind that?”
Tell me… does that sound like a brilliant compromise? Would you expect an abolitionist to see the wisdom in such a proposal?
When Lincoln or Stowe rejected that suggestion, would you agree with the reasonable Southerner that “Those abolitionists don’t really care about ending slavery.”
That analogy isn’t forced at all.
Actually, it’s not forced. In fact, it’s a damn near PERFECT analogy. But even if you don’t see that, humor me and play along.
The Southerner just made a logical, rational proposal that could reduce the number of slaves substantially. Isn’t that something abolitionists should want?
Shouldn’t Frederic Douglass have embraced a plan to reduce the number of slaves?
Please play along and explain why the Southerner’s proposal would be unacceptable to any abolitionist. And THEN you’ll have the answer to why “Pass out more condoms to prevent abortion” doesn’t sit well with people who regard abortion as a moral issue.
And “moral issue” is the key. If you regard abortion or slavery the way you regard, say, tooth decay (an undesirable problem but not a moral issue), then seemingly “pragmatic solutions” (handing out confirms or toothbrushes) sound great. If a larger moral issue is involved, those measures seem wholly inadequate - they even seem like missing the point.
You seem to be projecting more than a little bit.
I started out asking questions because I was trying to find the holes in precisely the argument you are projecting onto me. The thread has predictably devolved into liberals arguing that conservative views are wrong, when what I was foolishly hoping for was to get a range of conservative views about whence comes opposition to sex education and birth control information. At least I got a few.
I get the moral objections to casual, especially teen-age, sex. If we are to take your “analogy” literally, we should apparently be fighting an all-out war against it, rather than compromise with it by trying to alleviate its effects. (Note: on a moral level, casual sex and slavery are light-years apart, so tactics useful for to one would not be relevant to the other.)
What I am having difficulty understanding is the view that more information about sex is a bad thing for teens, at a time when they need all the tools they can get to make sensible decisions. With the proviso that the curriculum should be well-designed and age-appropriate, and that it should deal with moral and emotional as well as biological issues, sex education in schools seems to me to be both useful and necessary.
But to get serious conservative views, wouldn’t you need a board with a broad conservative base?
You could go to e.g. www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist and follow his articles with links to evangelical news articles on how the leaders / spokepersons tell the followers on why sex ed is bad, or read one of the books that are distributed in the evangelical circles.
From reading what former evangelicals, and current spokepersons of evangelicals say, the official thinking is that “teenagers won’t think of sex if we don’t tell them (and keep them busy, maybe)”, which was the standard recipe in the 18th century (when good birth control and good medical knowledge was not available). Hint: it didn’t work, and it works less today.
Ex-evangelicals and non-evangelicals observers point out that taken together, all the seperate points of evangelical culture (purity balls, shaming of women for premarital sex but “boys will be boys”, difficulty of access to abortion together with lack of medical knowledge) paint a comprehensive picture where (old white rich) men have access to women for sex, but women should not enjoy sex (maybe because they would leave and look for better sex?), and getting pregnant or STDs is therefore good punishment for daring to have sex.
This thinking is borne out not only by polls - seperated not among Republicans/ democrats, but among different christian denominations - and also by elected politicans from the conservative party/ fundamentlist spectrum, revealing complete lack of knowledge about reproductive and female health (see the crusade against Planned Parenthood), along with the proven lies and untruths, about abortion and other related reproductive health issues, that are spread around in these circles.
Because it’s a kind of bubble culture, getting inside from an outsider perspective is at first shocking, but quickly becomes repetetive, since they all repeat their sources.
As for the Catholic Church: for some reason, Peter DeRosa (ex-Catholic priest) is largely unknown in the english-speaking world. He wrote three books about Catholicism, the first about the history of the popes, the second about sexual moral and ethics according to official RCC standards (and how it changed) and the third on historical Jesus.
In the Sexual moral book, he explains the evolution of the current attitude towards sex in marriage and what methods of limiting number of children are allowed and why. It was only reading that that I finally understood why in the 90s, there was a big case when a nurse wanted to marry a man in a wheelchair in a latin american country, and the bishop didn’t allow it - because the man was able to have sex, but not to have children (or something like that - details are fuzzy), so the marriage wouldn’t be valid according to the standards and rules for a catholic marriage.