elisheva

This just seems like common sense to me.

sunnykerr

You don't say, huh?

I'm sorry, I don't mean to disparage. Obviously, up to a certain point, abstinence is absolutely the way to go. But come on. There's a reason everybody says information is the most powerful weapon. And, in my experience anyway, just because people talk about safe sex doesn't mean they have sex earlier.

Heck, my mum brought a condom demonstration package (you know, the banana and the literature) home when I was ten. Which, by the way, would have made my brother eight at the time. And she showed us the whole thing. And she kept talking about it... well, quite frankly, to this day. Not every time we see her, obviously, but it pops up in conversation. And, believe me, I know, neither one of us had sex at thirteen just because our mum mentioned safe sex when we were very young.

Now, obviously, eight and ten is on the young side to start that kind of education. My mum is a nurse, so it wasn't anything all that odd for us. She's always been about the health.

I'm just saying that there would be a lot less teenage pregnancies if people told teens the realities of sex. There would probably a lot less teenage STDs, come to that.

elisheva

Urgh, the FF goblin ate my post. But yeah, I agree. I didn't get much sex ed in school, so I learned the stuff on my own. But I think most people don't do that.

And if you talk to teenagers, you realize that people really know very little a lot of the time. The things some kids believe about sex and pregnancy! "You can't get pregnant if...." - and they think the most ridiculous things (if you rinse with soda pop, if you do it in a pool, if you have sex standing up, if it's your first time). So yeah, high schools need to teach this. Because when it comes to the point when kids make that choice, they need to be informed. Assuming they won't ever make the choice until they're married etc (and even then you still need to know this!!) is just blind and destructive.

sunnykerr

The one that gets to me is the whole "oral sex isn't sex" thing. Like you can't get STDs from doing that, or it doesn't count or whatever.

And it's so clear that abstinence-only education doesn't work. Unless we're talking polygamist regions and Menonites, have you honestly ever heard of a place in this world where teaching abstinence only has actually translated into zero teenage pregnancies? It doesn't work.

spent cigarette

Abstinence-only programs are extremely outdated, to be perfectly honest I didn't even think we taught it in schools anymore. I've been out of high school for three years now, but when I did sex-ed it was very practical and open-minded, which I appreciated then and appreciate even more now. We learnt about STDs, about how "no means no", etc etc. But we also received free condoms, were taught how to put them on a "banana penis", how you can tell when it breaks, and in Year 10 were given brief rundowns on the different Pills available to us and the different side-effects that came with each.

Then again, I am from Australia. Maybe things are more conservative in the US. Here our teachers emphasised the fact that they weren't there to stand at the front of the classroom and preach to us the evils of sex, drugs, alcohol, etc. Their duty was to present us with the information necessary to make informed decisions. Rather than watch “scare videos” on how Sally Sue had three beers at a party and was found dead the next morning, we were taught how to recognise the signs of a spiked drink, and what we should do to avoid it happening to us. We were taught about “standard drinks”, how the body digests alcohol and how we should “know our limit” when out partying. The focus was less on “Don’t do it” and more on “Do it safely” and I think us students benefited greatly from that.

Frankly, I don't think we need to be urging kids to "wait" until marriage -- that's a moral expectation that IMO a school has no right to inforce. School exists to inform and enlighten, it should merely provide kids with the necessary information and then say "You know enough to now make your own informed decisions. Whether you now choose to have sex or not is entirely up to you, but we're here to make sure that when you do make the decision to sleep with your partner, be it tomorrow or in thirty years, you know all you need to know and can practice sex safely and happily."

fetch

Exactly. I mean, learning about condoms isn't the biggest turn-on. It's not like you get out of class and say "all right, who wnats to go to the bushes with me?"
People will have sex. At 13 or at 21 or before or after. I have friends who lost their virginity in high school and I have friends who at 20 are still virgins.

elisheva

True. I can't imagine having your sex ed/moral ed teacher explain how condoms can prevent STDs suddenly makes kids go "OMG SEX? I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT! COOL!"

fetch

Nothing like learning about disease to get you hot