When my daughter was old enough to need this information, I told her what I knew, and then I looked up some stuff…and I was amazed at how much information had changed.
Schools aren’t the only places where you can learn, but most of them tend to have information that’s more up-to-date than what a parent learned 20 or 30 years ago. And the parent might very well have forgotten quite a bit of what s/he learned. For instance, when I had sex ed, just about all of the STDs could be cured with antibiotics. We hadn’t heard of HIV yet. Condoms were regarded as the least reliable form of birth control.
Now, I do think that parents have an obligation to teach their kids about real life, and sex is part of real life. But I also think that in many cases, schools can provide a lot of information, too. And I know that a lot of parents don’t want to acknowledge that their kids are growing up, and getting interested in sex, and need to know about sex.