Articles
Printed in the Northville Record, April 30, 2009
Sex Education – What will the outcome be?
written by Helen Crown
There’s a lot of talk and debate these days about sex education in the public schools. Issues like, what should be included, what should be excluded, moralizations, and tolerance, abound. Many involved in the debate will say they’re trying to do what is “best” for the youth; that by giving them the A to Z on reproduction and contraception is what needs to be done to “help” this generation reach their (sexual) potential. I would beg to differ.
Much of the current sex education material presented in public schools today is based on Dr. Kinsey’s notion that children are sexual beings from birth, and therefore, must be given information of how to experience and express their sexuality from very young ages. With due respect to Dr. Kinsey, his research on young children was criminal and the implications of his findings, disastrous, for future generations. You see, just because all the parts are present, doesn’t mean they’re ready to be implemented. Yes, all the physical parts pertaining to ones sexuality are present in humans from the time of birth (truthfully, from the time of conception) but those parts, along with one’s emotional and spiritual aspects, develop overtime. Young children are not equipped emotionally or spiritually to process information pertaining to sexuality or even the complexity of intimate relationships until well past the teen years.
Teens who are given the message from adults, whether parents or educators, “Well, we’d prefer that you’d wait to become sexually active until you’re in a committed long term monogamous relationship, but we know that’s pretty unlikely, so we’re going to equip you with plenty of options. If you don’t want to choose abstinence because you think you’re ready to have sex, here are some condoms, birth control pills, sponges, depo privera, or maybe the diaphragm or an IUD is right for you?” Then these same curricula spend inordinate amounts of time talking about all the negative consequences of the decision to become sexually active at a young age. “You’ll be at risk for some treatable sexually transmitted infections like Chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis, all of which can show up in the throat as well as our posterior orifices. And be especially afraid of contracting the incurables: HIV, HPV and Herpes.” Emotional and psychological are inadequately addressed. Any mention of spiritual consequences might be considered illegal. All this to “help” our youth.
I have an idea. What if we focus on teaching our children the benefit of restraint and self-control when it comes to their sexuality? Focus on the benefits of abstinence. Allow me to go one step farther as a Christian; what if we teach them God’s plan for sexuality? God designed sex to occur in the committed relationship we know as marriage, to be defined as one man and one woman. Sex was made for marriage and marriage was made for love (as defined by 1 Corinthians 13:4-7). It is only under these conditions that sex is completely protected from the litany of negative consequences. This is the only safe sex for humans of any age.
When schools educate youth extensively about contraception (with parents’ permission, by the way) they shouldn’t be surprised when these young people go out and practice what’s been presented. Educators educate for outcome; we teach what we want the student to learn. It would be as if you want to teach someone arithmetic, but you give up almost immediately by handing them a calculator. That young person will likely use the calculator and skip the arithmetic. If you want youth to learn abstinence, you can’t throw it out the window by saying, “You probably won’t learn it anyway so here’s a pack of condoms.”
What do we truly want the outcome of “sex education” to be? If we want it to be sex, then teaching teens, and essentially giving them permission to employ, the plethora of contraceptive choices, is the way to go. If we, parents, want the educational outcome for our children to be delaying sexual activity until a mutually monogamous relationship - marriage, then the educational tactics of sex education will need to shift.
