Sex Education - Why Are We Failing Our Children?

When I was in the 6th grade at my Catholic School in the 1970s we had one day during the year when the boys were herded off by the only male teacher at school, the 20something former student who taught Boys' PE, and the girls were herded into the small hall for a lecture from a student's mother who happened to be a public health nurse. I remember squirming a bit as this woman explained the basics about our changing bodies and what 'becoming a woman' meant. She even got up on a chair to show us, over her clothes, how to apply a sanitary napkin and how to properly wipe ourselves after toileting to avoid disease and unwanted germs. I am certain there were girls in my class who had never been taught these things by their own mothers. I was one of them, of course, but I did have older sisters who taught me. Next the parent taught us the rudimentary basics of sexual intercourse, and using a visual aid from a gynecologist's office, showed us a model of the womb, both with and without fetus, and without being too terribly graphic let us know what had to arrive in the canal first before a baby could be made. When she asked for questions no hands went up. Prepared for this lack of curiosity, she had some 'general questions' ready and she answered them for us.

In freshman year at Girls' School in Health class we saw the graphic pictures of male organs infected with all manner of advanced veneral disease. Perhaps the nuns felt if we saw only disease ridden organs we would lose any desire to have sex, and they may have been right. Some of us lost any desire to have lunch for a few days too.

In my senior year of high school the anatomy and physiology teacher approached the text chapter on procreation and birth control with due candor. There were only fourteen senior girls in the honors class, and I'm sure she knew some were already sexually active. She brought in samples of different types of birth control and told us how they all worked, at one point employing a banana as a visual aid. Again, there was much embarrassment and no questions. The teacher went on to explain a few more things, like the reality that you could get a 'venereal' disease (it was the fall of 1980, a year or two early for the term STD) through other than full on intercourse. She also sought to debunk the myth that you wouldn't get pregnant if you exercised the 'withdrawal' method. One girl in the back of the lab dropped her textbook to the floor loudly at this last tidbit of information and she was invited to stay after class and get more information. Yes, this honor student whose father was a well known physician, as were some of her older brothers, and who proclaimed to be a virgin, had been misled by her slightly older boyfriend who told her what they were doing was not having sex and she was still a virgin and could not get pregnant. As we used to say in high school, by the grace of God, she soon changed their dating habits and remained disease and pregnancy free and went on to medical school herself.

I had always thought my own experience of sex education was on the 'education lite' side. Afterall, Catholic Schools are not known for blazing horizons in knowledge of sexuality. But, compared to what my children have learned, both in Catholic and public schools to date, it was actually quite thorough. When my oldest daughter was in the fifth grade I received a permission slip and an invitation to a pre-screening of the 'health film' that was mandatory in state curriculum at this age. If I didn't sign the permission slip my child would be exempted from the film and the health lectures. I promise you, my parents had no such option.
I went to view the film though I had already signed the slip saying my daughter could participate in the class. I hadn't chosen to deny her any other health related information in school, so I couldn't see why I'd deny her this information. The film was embarrassingly familiar right down to the people in it, but it did carry very rudimentary and factual information. I was surprised when two parents who were sitting next to me shook their heads and said they were not going to let their child see the films. They would decide what their child learned about his changing body. Only two children in my daughter's Catholic School class absented themselves from the health class in 5th grade and again in 8th grade. At the nieghborhood public school where my son later attended, the level of non-participation was slightly higher. In each class of 25 5th graders, about four did not attend.

I thought this skittishness was probably due to the fact the parents thought their children were too young or immature to understand the information for what it was, but just this week my younger daughter, who is 14 and a high school freshman, begged me to consent to her not taking certain portions of her Health class. This is my all advanced courses, straight A, very driven student. I asked her why she didn't want to go, since the information was vital, and she said most of her friends weren't going. Their parents felt it was their job and their job alone to teach or not teach about STDs, procreation, etc. She said her friends already knew all about abstinence and so they didn't need to learn anything else. I was puzzled. It is a legitimate part of the school curriculum, and it is vital public health information. I don't expect my kids to run out and have sex (even the solo sex so painfully peripherally referred to in the 5th grade health film) just because they now know what it is, that it serves a basic biological purpose (on top of the lusty business they see it depicted as in soap operas and movies and even in Carl's Jr's ads involving washing a car). My older daughter went through all the sex ed and is still innocent, but informed. In fact, much of her steadfastness in refusing a physical relationship with her 17 year old boyfriend of 7 months, has to do with her belief that she is not emotionally ready and her awareness that one careless mistake could change her whole life. At home I talk until I'm blue in the face about spending only an appropriate amount of time with her boyfriend and not having him in her room, not being remote from people on their dates, etc for moral reasons - but those health lectures and films show the consequences outside of moral nagging. I think my daughter is making her choices based more on our personal beliefs and morals, but when push comes to shove, she saw all those pregnant girls in her classroom talking about how their lives changed at age 13, 14 or 16 because they thought they couldn't get pregnant if he pulled out, or on the first time, or they hadn't even realized they'd actually had sex it happened so fast. The teacher who provided all the information on STDs and who stressed to the class that most of the new cases of Clamydia at the county level have arisen with females who didn't believe the disease was transmitted through oral sex.

My older daughter and I have very candid, sometimes awkward conversations about these very issues. Many times she wouldn't have some to me with the question at all had it not been for what she'd learned in school. So, I find my younger daughter's reluctance to learn important information troubling. She says all of her friends at the public high school are devout Christians (we are devout Catholics, and are thus Christian as well). She says their churches, youth groups, pastors and finally their parents are telling them they don't need to know this information because they are not to be sexually active. Well, our pastor, our youth group - they also say my daughter should remain chaste, but they aren't telling us not to educate her. Now my daughter feels a great deal of pressure from her friends who wonder why she is going ahead and learning the Health curriculum in its entirety if she is so committed to innocence. She tells me, frankly, she's very embarrassed by the whole subject. I understand that and let her know all kids her age are akward with the subject, but it is a fact of life. It would be like not learning about photosynthesis or not getting the information she got in health class about meningitis prevention or how the flu is spread.

I was honestly concerned my younger daughter, who would normally never cut a class or pretend to be sick, might do one of those two things to get out of a specific health lecture, so I went to talk to her teacher. I was appalled to find out that in a class of 45 students, 12 had opted out of the section on reproductive science and sexually transmitted diseases. She said the number has been growing for the past few years from a single student or two, to as many as a third of a class opting out. It makes grading the entire class on the same basis impossible, and it, according to this teacher, is the only area in which students are allowed to not learn a portion of a syllabus without consequence. I suppose I would argue it is not 'without consequence'. It may not have an academic consequence in that class, but it will have consequences at some point. Ignorance always has consequences.

I have written on similar topics before, because I am mystified at how we are failing our students and also how I feel government is falling down on hte job with regard to many public health issues, but the issue of how miserably we are failing to provide basic and meaningful education to a full generation of future adults in this country is unconscionable to me having been someone who came of age during the onset of the AIDs epidemic. I think as a society we may want to think we all became a little bit scared abstinent, or at least scared careful for a while, when in reality we were not. What eventually happened was appropriate information on containing the virus filtered out at the same time improved treatments were coming along. There is still no cure for AIDs but there are significant, proven ways to prevent or minimize the likelihood of spread. Needles and condoms. Things we don't like to talk about. But, we braved through it and came out the other end. Now, as the first decade of the new millenium winds down, STDs among people under the age of 21 are at an all time high in this country, and instead of stepping up and being more aggressive with basic education to the target age group and before people get into that age group - more and more schools are faced with parents choosing to opt their children out of standard education on disease and its spread.

I guess I don't see a different landscape today than existed when I was in high school or junior high. Kids didn't talk to their parents about sex then, they don't really now. School became the great equalizer. You could get the basic facts your parents didn't want to share or that you were too embarrassed to ask about - and armed with those facts you had a much better chance of remaining disease free. Because, while as much as a third of health classes, made up of freshmen and sophomore students, may be opting to learn only about abstinence and with their parents as their primary source of information, more than 25% of teens in that same age group are sexually active, and by the time you get to age 18, it is more than 50%. There is definitely some crossover between the uneducated and the sexually active statistical groups. When you cross those two things, you end up with the reality these kids are more likely to be the ones who get pregnant and/or who contract sexually transmitted diseases. From a parental perspective that is regrettable, but from a public health perspective it seems inexcusable to me.

Nothing I learned in health class motivated me to become sexually active. My older daughter feels the same way. My younger daughter, torn by peer pressure favoring abstinence only education and non-participation in health class, wonders why she has to even be informed. Peer pressure is exactly the reason. It is nothing new under the sun. We have the knowledge, we know the power it wields, the disease it can prevent, but we are failing our kids by not seeing to it that they get this information in the most objective, comprehensive manner available to them through our school systems.