In one week in a French speaking region I learned more French than all my education.
If you'd spent a week in that region without having some education first, you'd have learned nothing.
Where I live, a place where the Catholic church has banned all sex education, there are hundreds of thousands of young people who barely know what STDs are or how they are transmitted. Huge percentages of teens surveyed believe that AIDS can be prevented by taking antibiotics before sex, or that AIDS can only be contracted by gay people or from foreigners. There are girls who believe (they are taught this by nuns) that if they swim in a pool with boys, the boys will ejaculate uncontrollably, and the sperm will swim through the water, home in on them, drive through their bathing suits, swim up their vaginas, and make them pregnant. Conversely, there are lots of people who believe that pregnancy can be prevented by douching after sex. There are lots of people who are completely unaware of the basic physical and psychological mechanisms involved.
As one might expect, it is also a country where huge numbers of teenagers get pregnant, and where STDs are largely out of control.
Ignorance of this sort can be largely alleviated by education. It should be noted that the function of an intelligent sex education program should not be to promote or discourage anything. It should simply provide the information needed for young people to assess risk and make intelligent decisions. Even with that information, there will still be lots of people that do not make intelligent decisions. But, as I think we've already demonstrated, the schools cannot make decisions for young people. They can, and should, make sure that young people are not totally ignorant about the matters upon which they are deciding.
I do not believe that any teenager has ever had sex because of something learned in a sex education class that would not have had sex in any event without it. |
