posted
New Policy at Wake County public schools in NC.
They'll be teaching abstinence and eventual heterosexual marriage as the only option. What really angers me is this:
quote:No Wake County Public School System employee shall provide information to any student about where to obtain contraceptives and/or abortion referral services.
This is the problem with the push to teach Abstinence in schools. It's not that Abstinence is the problem, it's that people insist on completely cutting off all safe sex education. It's ridiculous.
Posts: 1892 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
I think this comes from the constant push towards Political Correctness and Scientific teachings dealing with Evolution. They both are double edged swords, the back edge being that you can't escape the fact that without heterosexual relationships the human race cannot sustain itself.
It might also come from the fact that abstenance is the healthiest solution for people in the target age group. STDs can still be spread without swapping fluids.
I see your point with only teaching one side of the story and I agree with you. It doesn't matter what you do, you'll always have people doing the nasty behind the theater. It should be taught both ways.
Posts: 1660 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
I've never understood why abstinence-only education qualifies as a course. I mean, really, isn't it a thirty-second speech? How can a semester be spent not telling kids how to protect themselves from having children or from spreading STDs?
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote: think this comes from the constant push towards Political Correctness and Scientific teachings dealing with Evolution. They both are double edged swords, the back edge being that you can't escape the fact that without heterosexual relationships the human race cannot sustain itself.
Heh. Scott, do you really think that the US is in danger of becoming underpopulated? Let alone by a mass surge toward homosexual relationships because persecution against them isn't encouraged?
I mean this in the least offensive way possible, but is your sexuality so flexible that you would be homosexual today if you weren't surrounded by anti-homosexual propaganda growing up? Because, honestly, that's the only way your argument can hold any basis at all in reality, and even then it's only a subjective and pretty freaking unique opinion on the dangers of homosexuality.
Well, not unique. You'd be amazed how many anti-homosexual arguments encompass the if-kids-aren't-raised-against-homosexuality-they're-raised-for-it rhetoric.
quote:It might also come from the fact that abstenance is the healthiest solution for people in the target age group. STDs can still be spread without swapping fluids.
It's also healthiest for teenagers to never drive -- consider how large the accident ratio is for young males, especially. But they're going to drive; would you really support a driver's ed program that doesn't teach kids how to drive?
Though I'm glad to hear you support sex ed that teaches kids how to prevent pregnancy, despite the imminent danger of a mass emptying of the United States.
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote:I've never understood why abstinence-only education qualifies as a course. I mean, really, isn't it a thirty-second speech? How can a semester be spent not telling kids how to protect themselves from having children or from spreading STDs?
Isn't sex ed just a segment of health class? It was for me, anyway. How do you spend an entire semester talking about sex, even if you don't limit it to abstinence only?
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
For some reason I think the constant message of "SEX! (psst, don't have it)" will result in more tension and confusion and, well, sex. No idea what would give me that idea.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I agree that statistically speaking, the population least likely to get STD's is a single-partner-for-life monogamous relationship. Heterosexual or homosexual.
edit: actually, i suppose the population least likely to get STD's are those who stay abstinent and away from IV drug use, blood transfusion, surgery, etc.
posted
Lalo, I think you're misstating yourself. Abstinence education is teaching kids the BEST way to avoid children and STD's. It's just not telling them ALL the ways Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Tresopax: afterall, don't students in high school respect and trust their health education teachers more than their boyfriend/girlfriend/self? Posts: 1892 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Facetiousness aside, avoiding teaching kids about birth control, etc, doesn't make them less likely to have premature, ill-advised sex. Raising them in healthy, morally-upright two-parent homes where they actually witness a happy, stable marriage and experience a blissful childhood that they want to pass on to their own progeny by making mature choices as teenagers is what will do it. But how can you legislate THAT?
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posted
Am I the only person that had a sex ed class? They teach you about the human reproductive system, contraceptives, why they work, etc.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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My thought on this is that education is for life. We don’t expect teenagers to use everything they learn in school right away – why is sex ed any different? Most of them will be having sex at some point in their future. Hopefully many of them will eventually be having it with a spouse. But there aren’t any sex ed classes for about-to-be-married adults (well, there are, but they’re by no means universal.) The kids need to learn about things like birth control, even if they’re abstinent, so that when the time comes that they need the info they’ll have it.
There’s another point, that I’m almost hesitant to bring up, because it seems so outrageous. I know a woman, a few years younger than me, who got pregnant at 15. When her mom questioned her, “Didn’t we tell you not to have sex?” It came out that she didn’t actually know she was “having sex.” Her boyfriend was older, and called it by another name, and in movies and such she’d always heard it referred to by euphemisms. It seems ridiculous, I know, but she’d never made the connection between “making love” and “having sex.” So we at least need to teach young people enough that they know what it is we’re telling them not to do.
Tying into that, in many cases when young girls get pregnant, the father is several years older. These girls need to have good information, so that their possibly manipulative older boyfriends aren’t their sole source of knowledge about sexual matters. They need to know a lie or a line when they hear it.
Posts: 9866 | Registered: Apr 2002
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I wouldn't know in your case, Jon Boy, but there are a lot of people out there who have really bad sex lives because they just aren't aware of anything better.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Lalo, I didn't intend to raise the homosexual issue. But, if I was intending not to I guess I should have not said the heterosexual word huh? Sorry, I don't want to derail.
Also, your point with driving. Consider this, most states are now thinking about taking that away from minors all together (i.e. pushing the driving age to 18) for the very reason you state. Plus we've already discussed the Sex License issue once before with some in the gutter results.
quote:Lalo, I think you're misstating yourself. Abstinence education is teaching kids the BEST way to avoid children and STD's. It's just not telling them ALL the ways
Excellent point, Geoff. In fact, let's apply this to driver's ed courses. We can just teach kids not to drive. It's the BEST way to avoid accidents and drunk driving, after all, if people just don't drive. We're just not telling them ALL the ways to avoid accidents -- why would they need to know SMOG or why to never mix alcohol and driving at all if we're already teaching them the BEST way to avoid accidents?
quote:Facetiousness aside, avoiding teaching kids about birth control, etc, doesn't make them less likely to have premature, ill-advised sex. Raising them in healthy, morally-upright two-parent homes where they actually witness a happy, stable marriage and experience a blissful childhood that they want to pass on to their own progeny by making mature choices as teenagers is what will do it. But how can you legislate THAT?
We can't. Thus, we fall back to the next best option -- giving kids the knowledge they need to avoid having children that won't be raised in healthy, morally-upright two-parent homes where they can actually witness a happy, stable marriage and experience a blisfful childhood that they want to pass on to their own progeny by making the mature choices as teenagers their parents never did.
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
Just to make it clear, I wasn't attempting to imply anything. It was a disclaimer, because I really can't know, that I felt was useful because of previous twists of the conversation.
But there are a lot of people out there who do have that problem.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Sorry, fugu. I know you weren't trying to imply anything, but Papa Moose's joke rubbed me the wrong way.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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I think that if I were a student at an abstinence-only school, I'd hand out contraception pamphlets with candy during lunch to all the high schoolers. I wonder how quickly I'd get in trouble.
Posts: 1892 | Registered: Mar 2002
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1. My parents divorced when I was 12, and their relationship before that wasn't healthy in any real way, except that they had a healthy sex life. I think my mother wouldn't have put up with my dad's controling nature if that part of their relationship hadn't been really good.
2. My older sister got married while still in college and had a baby.
3. I was reasonably pretty, and like my mother before me, a bit of a sensual creature.
So why DIDN'T I get into all sorts of trouble? Education and self-interest, simply put. My sister gave me her Human Sexuality Textbook when I was 16 or so. Very soon I knew the results of every Masters and Johnson study published before 1987. I knew all the nasty stuff that could go wrong with having sex, and I knew that, being a virgin, it would hurt. And I honestly didn't want to let somebody hurt me unless I was completely sure of him. Sure he loved me, sure he wanted to please me, and sure that he could please me.
So I remained abstinent for purely selfish reasons. I was raised in a religious atmosphere, but I also knew sex should be fun.
Still, I'm not sure that a school program could have done for me what my own self-directed study did.
I AM saying that I did 'the right thing' for reasons other than having a happy, stable family life and the proper religious upbringing. Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
Me? Yeah, I guess I'm okay. I'm stressed about money, the weather is making me depressed, and the "Jon Boy isn't funny anymore" comments are really getting on my nerves. All in all, I'm just a little grouchy. But otherwise, I'm going great.
[ January 15, 2004, 01:02 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
No, that was Pat. Or maybe it was me. Or maybe it was both of us. You know how hard it is to keep us straight. Anyway, I don't think I'm anti e-hug.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
I had an entire semester of sex ed, and there was stuff we didn't get around to covering. I took it as a junior even though it was a senior level course. I really think it should have been a sophomore level course.
Sure, if all you say is STD's are bad, mmmkay? then you can't fill a whole semester, but we looked at some of the more prevelant and serious ones and discussed them in the context of treatment, prevention, symptoms, incubation times...we could have spent the entire semester on AIDS alone. We talked about a ton of contraceptive methods, statistics for teen pregnancy and pre-marital sex in general, rape, consent, family planning, a whole ton of stuff.
I thought it was an absolutely excellent course. Some people really didn't like a lot of the more graphic images we were shown, but having them in the context of an actual education on sex was amazingly different than having them in the shock tactic 1 day coverage of sex that some of my friends in other schools got.
Posts: 3956 | Registered: Jun 2001
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I know Pat started the list, but I was fairly certain you posted yourself to it. And I have NO trouble telling you and Pat apart -- well, except when you two try to confuse us.
posted
Oh, I probably did put myself on the list. I think it's one of those things I've wavered on. Sometimes I really appreciate them, and other times they've seemed sort of annoying and meaningless.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Another problem with abstinence education is that you can still get diseases from the things that aren't intercourse. And if they don't go into great detail about what Abstinence entails, people will say they're abstinent when it just that they're not having intercourse. It's misleading.
Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
A friend in college worked at a clinic in one of the poorer parts of town. A patient was having her third child before turning 20 when my friend asked her why she was having unprotected sex when she knew the results.
The pregnant girl responded, "What does sex have to do with havin kids?"
Education is mandatory. Sure, its best if mom and dad have a nice long talk. But some don't. And the children of the parents who don't are likely to be the ones you, your friends, or your children are dating.
This pronouncement, "Don't tell the kids about contraceptives and abortion." is purely punative. "You are having sex? Shame on you. We will make sure you suffer appropriately for it."
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
That's fairly jaw-dropping, Dan. Not sure if my story can measure up--but I had a friend, who at 25, with as much education as could be stuffed into her brain and a super-feminist mother, who did not realize that sex could get you pregnant at pretty much any time. She thought you had to 'try' for a year or so--what exactly 'trying' might entail other than plain ol' sex wasn't clear.
She had just gotten married, and had been active for at least 3 years before that. I don't know how she managed not to get pregnant.
Never underestimate what can get made up in the absence of hard information. I really do not understand why "Abstinence-only" programs get pushed, when a program such as celia described would be so much more productive and IMO likely ot cut down on disease and pregnancy.
Posts: 335 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
I guess I was kinda lucky with my schooling in this regard. I can't say we had a structured class, but rather a few times a year, starting in 5th grade, we'd spend a half day going over all the various issues with sex.
It certainly kept me a virgin for a long time... At the same time, I've found that I've never had as much of a hangup about it.
Did anyone else start sex ed this early? It was actually an interesting social commentary, considering I started learning sex ed around the time the AIDS epidemic blew up (~1987).
The social commentary was that the boy's video on puberty was irreverent, funny, and still a learning experience, whereas the girls video was very straightforward, dry, and while educational, if you weren't a knowledge freak like I was (am), you'd be bored 10 minutes in. Weird how our expectations for the genders are, huh?
Anyway, I know that throughout middle school (and then continued through my private high school), we had frequent presentations, videos and the like, about sex. There were still some holes in my info, but I knew how to use a condom, if necessary, I knew the basics on birth control, including the basic chemistry, how STDs are transmitted (to contradict an earlier poster, STDs are ALWAYS passed through fluids, it just may not be semen or vaginal fluids... Blood or saliva can be effective transmission mediums, hence oral SEX is not safe!), how a baby is born. I do wish they explained abortion and adoption better, though.
I'm glad I had this education. It was my only way. The only thing my parents did was get a puberty/basic biology book when I was 12, with a note saying to come to them if I had questions. Of course, how could I feel comfortable when they obviously didn't? They were well meaning, but embarassed, coming from an era where parents didn't do that sort of thing.
I think abstinence should be stressed as the absolute best way, but we also should give kids a full toolbox. And even if you don't explicitly educate students on abortion and family planning, they will find out, and it's best they get the straight dope from trusted adults, than friends or siblings, should they ask.
posted
I wish I'd had a more comprehensive sex ed course because frankly, i don't know what things are. For example- the base system, I've had a couple friends explain it to me, but I'm still fairly clueless. Also there are lots of things that just don't occur to you when you're not in a relationship, but then you're in a relationship and you basically have to depend on your boyfriend that you're not going farther than you want to (for moral purposes) because you don't know.
Or to summarize, I'm really confused and a comprehensive sex ed course could potentially have made me less so.
Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
i've seen some pretty long debates on what the "bases" actually are, and, to be quite honest, i've concluded that the "base system" is dependent on the local definition. making it rather useless in an educational context.
if you want to know what base you're at to brag to your friends, i have no desire to even help. if you want to discuss a specific act, you should use it's name so as to avoid confusion with the variations in "base systems".
uh, how about if i just have a long talk with your boyfriend about that? Posts: 3956 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
I would rather know specific names of things, just so I have a gneereal idea of what's going on. I definately have NO desire to brag to my friends. And it's quite fine thanks, no need for you to talk to my boyfriend. Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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When you spoke of the base system, I was wondering for what purpose one would use something other than decimal when dealing with sexual activity. Then, of course, I was gonna make a stupid "period" joke. Then I realized what blacwolve was talking about, and I've never been clear on the base system, either.
While I haven't heard anyone refer to the bases in years, I'm fairly sure first base is kissing, second base is hand-based sex, third base is oral sex, and home is, well, a home run.
Though, heh, I'd love to meet anyone past the age of fourteen that still judges their sex life by those standards.
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
The generic bases when I heard them (30 years ago or so) were:
1st: Kissing, hands above clothes. 2nd: Contact above the waist. 3rd: Contact below the waist. Home: Intercourse.
This is, of course, wildly inadequate to chart all the ancilliary sex acts with any sort of relevance to each, and it completely ignores the infield-fly rule.
(Edited to reflect time period, lalo's is similar with different standards, which points out rather neatly hwo the arguments get started )
[ January 15, 2004, 03:30 PM: Message edited by: Chris Bridges ]
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