Should Sex Ed Be Taught Outside the Home? If So Where & When??

Great Debates
1

Don’t you think it’s ironic that in today’s society, so many people have
to adopt children
while teens who have no right being in the baby making business
are spewing out toddlers faster than a candy conveyor belt?

Is it just me or does it appear that kids are screwing like there’s no
Tomorrow? (Probably because to them it looks like there’s no tomorrow)

The U.S. still has the highest adolescent birthrate in the
developed world. And it’s spawned a generation of fatherless bambinos,
who wind up joining gangs, or even worse, become bi-polar starving
artists!!!

Why are more and more parents not stepping up
to the plate to teach their kids about wearing condoms?? (Not just for pregnancy concerns but to protect them from STD’s) Embaressment? Pride? Lack of knowledge themselves?

I visited this site: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/teenbrth.htm and was amazed at the number of kids still having kids!

I swear, these days High school newsletters are happy to print birth announcements, and the senior yearbooks have the growth
and development of their students’ children in a special section!

How many more years of pounding into these kids heads about Aids, pregnancy and STD’s must we preach before they get it through their heads to use protection? (Maybe prophylactic companies should sell condoms with a secret prize in every box like back in the old days when your favorite cereal came with
a prize!!!)

Should parents swallow their own inhibitions and teach the kids using proper language and description, or should they leave it up to sex ed in school?

If you’re against Sex Ed in school let me ask you this…Would you rather your kid go to a Sex Ed class NOW, or a Lamaze class 9 months from now?

If they’re going to teach Sex Ed then while we’re at it, let’s teach a follow-up class to sex education. Call it - - Reality Class 101 The Right Thing To Do If You Bring a Baby into This World Hammering home to a high school kid that they’re going to have to quit school, quit playing Game Cube, quit spending hours surfing & downloading games, quit "hanging’ out with friends, and instead - - work a 50-hour week dropping meat by-product into a vat for some chain restaurant just so they can keep little “Debi” in baby formula and diapers!!!

My son has a friend “Alex” who at age 15 had sex once and is now HIV
positive! Kids somehow believe they won’t be the ones TO GET PREGNANT or
CATCH/TRANSFER AIDS, SYPHILIS, GONORRHEA, HERPES! WHY???

What can we do to change this mentality?!

How did it come to pass that teens have gone from overcrowding VW
Bugs in hope of getting their pictures taken for the newspaper to
overcrowding the planet?

IMHO parenting is the most difficult job in the world.
Ironically, it’s the easiest job to get
next to a foreigner opening a 7-11 around the corner!!!

You don’t even need a license! (You just have to screw up once and it’s
yours.) Thirteen-year-olds having babies so that they can feel grown
up. What happened to girls putting on Mom’s dresses and trying on
her jewelry? How do we begin to rectify this problem?

Yes I am a Christian and I too was appalled (at first) at the school
systems for handing out condoms in the Nurses office. But the more I
think about it…I don’t think schools are passing out condoms to give
kids permission to hump like bunnies.

What does the NRA say ???
CONDOMS DON’T MAKE BABIES
PEOPLE DO!!!

Is the trouble the enviroment the kids reside in (i.e., sexually explicit music, access to porno, or how about access to premium channels)
In fact scratch the last comment about “premium channels” look at the &%)#%&*#%^ commercials on tv! Our kids are bombarded with crap everywhere – everyday about sex!!!

I think we should stop making assinine commercials like the
ones making boob jobs look like something fun to do over spring break
or showing Ana Nicole Smith licking her fingers and frolicking in the
white caps of the ocean talking (baby talk sexy) when she’s
advertising a diet pill which she claims made her loose weight.

We need to stop making pumped-up abs the only logo our kids ever see
for “The Good Life.” Then maybe we’ll see a day when the only ovens our
kids have buns in say “E-Z Bake” on the side.

Your thoughts?

2

I can certainly get behind this portion of your post.

Which, sort of answers your question a bit.

I think sex ed is wonderful. And I think that encouragement/pressure to behave in sexual ways does not come from the class room (I laugh at the idea of leaving ‘health’ class thinking, “gee, that was hot, I can’t wait to go try sex on my own. I never would have known about that if not for my teacher telling me”). It comes from friends, TV, movies, role models, etc etc, as well as an individual’s natural desire/curiosity.

Health class (which is where I had sex ed. in school) is mainly about the workings of the body, and real life potential consequences of sex (STDs, pregnancy), as well as the fact that it is natural and an ok thing, but it was not in any way encouraged.

I think the true answer is for parents to take true responsibility for raising their own kids. Limit/restrict TV. Stay active and involved in their kids’ lives. Encourage and help their kids explore what interests them. Love them. Heck, even the perfect parents might have crack-adict sex-worker children, but when you don’t take responsibility to be proactive about raising your kid, you let TV and the mass media do it for you.

3

It’s the boys who go for that now. :stuck_out_tongue:

4

Sex education should be taught on the simple-plumbing level in 2nd and 3rd grade, with introduction of the fact of sexual appetite by 4th grade, discussion of relationships and social mores in 5th and 6th, and guest speakers from a variety of walks of life and sexual experience coming in to answer questions in 7th and onward.

5

it’s to the point where i don’t think it’s too early. and please, if you can’t get behind this idea, or one like it, then please please please please at least have parenting classes mandatory from the 6th grade and up.
i think it’s a scenario of uninformed or misinformed choices. that and the general kid feeling that you can get away with “it” whatever “it” may be is up to you). education solves MANY problems we have today. this is definitely one of them that education at least helps.
closing your mind to the problem and not being a responsible civilization by providing birth control and education is amazingly stupid to moi.

6

Yes parents need to suck it up and talk to their kids about sex. While I’m not sexually active, I don’t think my parents gave me one talk on sexuality. That scares me a little. Fortunately I was a good detective on the matter and learned the information I needed :slight_smile: It has to come from home and the school. I actually like the idea of prospective parents having to take a parenting course, but I could see many people disagreeing with it (especially when Religion/ personal philosophy come into play) It would only work with morally neutral items, like budgeting, as opposed to instilling values and so forth.

As for eliminating the problem, I have no idea how to do it. Hormones are amazingly influential things and it seems they often win over intellect.

7

Always have, always will. Their bodies are ready for it and sending them every message possible that “now is the time!”

Among peasant peoples this isn’t a big problem – especially when a third of the women die in childbirth and half the children die in infancy or childhood. It’s imperative to keep cranking them out. Also, with large extended families, raising them is less of a problem.

Our society just isn’t well-structured to support this. We live in nuclear families and we can’t count on help from the other 25 relatives we would have in the same village under the old system. Also, we make kids go to school instead of going to work at 14, so they don’t have the time or the income.

8

Which class(es) should be dumped in order to institute these mandatory parenting classes that you want to subject every 11-18 year-old in the United States to?

I thought we had gotten away from the idea that parenthood was a foregone conclusion of being an adult, especially for the girls.

But hey, let’s take away a science or a math class that might be useful for university education and a promising career and teach them that they’re definitely going to pop out babies.

9

We don’t limit public education classes to those that will absolutely prove practically useful to every child: otherwise, we’d have to dump social studies, math, science, and reading for all purposes except the purely practical. We teach children that which they might need, and that which they will need in order to grow up into well-rounded, well-adjusted members of society. Even children who will not grow up to be parents need to be able to understand what parents go through; if they don’t, they risk ending up emotionally and socially stunted.

What can we give up? Students spend something like a month of every year, I believe, taking standardized tests. Research is starting to show that these tests don’t do much to help kids learn, and indeed they’re counterproductive, inasmuch as teachers teach to the test instead of teaching useful, interesting, productive lessons. Let’s give up some of the EOGs.

Daniel

10

Just to add some reality here, teenage pregnancy rates are in a decline. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/state_pregnancy_trends.pdf study (warning - pdf and from 2000) shows the teenage pregnancy rate dropped 22% from 1986 to 2000, and 28% from the peak in 1990 to 2000. I believe I’ve seen information that it has dropped since then.

I doubt we need a full class for parenting - but we do have hygiene and health classes, and I think a big part of that should be sex ed classes.

But let’s not panic folks. For some reason we think that things are worse today than yesterday, today might be the golden age.

I wonder if anyone has done a study linking the decline in teenage pregnancy to abortion. (Not birth - pregnancy.) I’d suppose those who were aborted might have been more likely than the average to be poor and get pregnant early.

11

sorry, I botched the line. Try this one. Also pdf.

12

What will happen to our brothels and our porn industry if the government takes over their sex education functions? And the goverment will probably handle sex ed so badly that we’ll wind up with a Japanese style birthrate and have to import Muslims to get our work done, and pretty soon WE’LL have a Muslim "problem"just like Holland. At least the Latinos don’t riot every time you dump a crucifix in a teeny glass of piss.

13

Responding to the thread title:

Back in my youth (when dinosaurs ruled the earth) the church I attended had sex ed courses in the young people’s club. Yep. Church.

And it wasn’t just “ooh, that’s evil.” It was factual. Very factual. The only religious part was that sex was a part of what God had created and, like other gifts, should be used responsibly, and with love.

14

How exactly does one get to the conclusion that sex ed is something other than “real education” and that something more worthy MUST be sacrificed to include it? Does it not fit handily into the science category? Biology is in there, right? How about history and social studies? Psychology? Don’t you think there’s some room in the curriculum of a lot of different subjects to include the sexual part of life? Maybe if we tackled sexuality with a holistic approach and allowed it its proper place in life and history we’d both demystify it and put it into its proper perspective.

Also I think it would be nice to spend some time on learning how to do it right, because just learning about horrible diseases and pregnancy doesn’t address all the conflicts and issues attendant on sexual expression. Let’s get to the point where nobody feels any more freaked out about talking sex as they do exchanging recipes and maybe we’ll all be on the road to a more healthy viewpoint and integration of sexuality into our lives.

15

I think that parenting/adult life courses shold be a part of high school education. I think the assumption was always that parents would teach their children about responsibility, both financial and personal, but I think it’s painfully obvious that it’s not happening in some families. Contraception is only a small part of it-- kids should also be learning about how hard it is out in the Real World, and that the choices they make now will affect how difficult their paths will be.

They should learn budgeting and home economics, as well as practical advice on how to get insurance, how do decide if loans are good deals, and polite social skills for the workforce. Of course, this all couldn’t be done at once, but should be spaced out through the high school years, and could easily be slipped into the current cirriculum. An English class could contain lessons on polite social interraction, for example.

16
  • An English class could contain lessons on polite social interraction, for example.*
    Mine always did, and look how it worked for me!
17

who says we’re taking one out?

could just have an additional class…or monthly field trips to planned pregnancy clinics or some such things.

and it’s not necessarily to teach them they’re GOING to pop out babies…if they want to, fine. let them. but they WILL know the (impending pun) ins and outs of sex and baby birthing so they know what could possibly happen

18

The biggest problem with the “sex ed should be taught at home” argument is that it assumes parents are well-informed. I assure you, this is not the case. If you gave a test of what most people would consider to be basic sexual knowledge to, say, parents of elementary school kids, you’d see some pretty craptacular scores. (You’d see some good scores, too, but it would probably be worse than you’d imagine on the whole.)

19

It never fails to surprise me how many people didn’t pick up on these lessons; that’s why I feel it should be further emphasised.

It’s not a skill which is innate. “What do you want?” is a perfectly legitmate question to ask a customer. It’s social training which teaches us to phrase it: “How may I help you?” Too many young people simply don’t see the difference, and it will hold them back when they enter the workforce.

Secondly, we often give young people the impression that they don’t have to “take” people treating them poorly-- that they should “speak up” for themselves. These are not Good Things when it comes to dealing with customers, or bosses, for that matter.

Thirdly, young people are often encouraged to “express themselves”, that they’re “special and unique.” It’s my opinion that much of our social ills comes from the latter-- everyone thinks their situation is the exception to the rules. The former simply won’t work in the Real World. Every parent who goes to bat for their kids’ rights to wear purple hair or bizarre clothing may be doing their kids a disservice. Frankly, the business world is all about comformity. They may be able to get away with it as kids, but few companies will take seriously an applicant who shows by their dress that they are a “rebel.”

20

If it’s the businessmen’s role to hold back social change, is it so unthinkable to support those who promote social change? Can both positions get a level playing field? “We are the music makers, / And we are the dreamers of dreams / But we are the movers and shakers / Of the world forever, it seems”- who said that?