Posted on 11/04/2009 10:48:06 PM PST by libh8er
American teenagers have more pregnancies, births and abortions than teens in other industrialized countries. Approximately 4 million teens contract a sexually transmitted disease each year. About 820,000 girls become pregnant before they turn 20.
Teens are having sex. There is no doubt about that, so does it help that the government will not fund a sex education program that teaches safe sex? 75 percent of parents say they would like their children to be taught both abstinence and safe sex. Yet, one-third of American high schools are teaching abstinence-only sex education. Other schools avoid the subject altogether. If sex education began in middle school and involved the topic of safe sex, the rate of teen pregnancies and STDs might be lower.
Nothing can be done to stop teens from having sex. According to the Center for Disease Control, 46.7 percent of U.S. high school students say they've had sex at least once during high school. Many middle school students are also admitting to engaging in oral sex.
Teaching safe sex would not be encouraging students to have sex, but rather to be safe if they do choose to so.
Perhaps the rate of teen pregnancies and STDs would not be so high if teens knew how to use a condom, or better yet, what a condom is.
In middle school, the only sex education I got was watching disgusting slides of STDs and hearing that if I have sex I'll get pregnant. Everyone in the school got the same classes, yet girls were still getting pregnant in middle school.
The scare tactic did not work. Teaching safe sex will not solve the problem of teen pregnancy and STDs, but I do think it will lessen it. If teens are aware of the risks of having sex, as well as how to be safe, they are more likely to be smart about it.
The better question is should public schools still exist.
Having gone to public school I have to say the case for separation of education and state is very strong.
There were fewer teen pregnancies before schools started teaching that everyone does it, and no one should restrain themselves.
I’m with you. Government Education = Government Propaganda
All kids need to do is walk out to the parking lot and watch what (or is that “who”) their teachers are doing.
I don’t think there is ever a one size fits all and touches all as far as social/cultural issues like sex education. Some kids come from families with no morals and some kids come from family with various religious morals. Sex is private. Therefore sex education should not be all one thing and I think that is why it does not work as a public, values free factory activity.
We should have a couple of Saturdays where kids go to privately designed and taught sex education sessions by their own choice. Some will be Christian, Catholic, Jewish, humanist, homosexual, etc. Some might be strictly medical like sex education used to be. Families choose what best fits their culture and values and that is what is most likely to touch and influence the children. It is not a good idea to have males and females together in sex education in the public schools. It does not respect the sexual boundries that are needed for young people.
Currently, teen pregnancy statistics are going up because of the huge influx of Central and South Americans where having kids and getting married as teens is not unusual.
NO.
By the time I got to High School I was totally bored and determined to escape.
I saw riots in my Jr. High School that were ignored by the media even back then.
Kids physically wrecking the schools with impunity. If only I could project the images blazed in my memory forever of what I saw to others here.
Teenagers literally wrecking parts of the building.
Just wanton destruction with no rational reason. I saw it with my own eyes. No media ever reported what I was witness to.
I dropped out!
I later turned things around with my G.ood E.nough D.iploma and moved on away from the carnage, and the sick joke that was the Boston Public Schools.
The media back then distracted (lied to) the public by focusing on the Federally mandated Busing Program that ultimately made all of the schools equally bad, accused the city (that was an escaped slave center and haven for generations) of endemic racism. The courts and the media intiated the total "white flight" from Boston.
That is part of why they call it HIS Story.
What planet is this person on? Sex-ed has been around for decades and decades. The first thing they should teach kids is that boys are boys and girls are girls and they should not be having sex until they have a job.
Reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmatic, and rimjobs. Forget the first three and just do the fourth.
No
The problem compared to earlier decades is that both the ages for marriage and employment have been raised unrealistically high, creating an idling gap in the mid to late teens.
Universal “Liberal” education should end at grade 8, followed by the options of trade, technical, business or arts preparation to grade 10 with the first one leading directly to work or apprenticeship and the latter three to college which would be complete to the Bachelors level by age 20. You do not need 12 or 16 years of education to sweep floors or empty bedpans and it is a waste of breath, time and resources to compel children to wait that long to be productive and reproductive.
Yes! 1,000 times Yes! The problem our culture has is that adolescence has been artificially extended. For most of humanity, we were dead at 35, if we were lucky. That’s why you see sexual maturity reached during the teenage years. If I hear one more middle aged parent call their 16 year old boy a “child” ... I just don’t understand that mindset. It’s crippled an entire generation. The boys’ great-grandfather likely fought in the trenches of the first world war and fathered children not that long after.
One of the wisest professors I had (she was British) said that the American obsession with every child going to college was detrimental to the country. She lamented that our nation had no respect for tradesman such as mechanics, and didn’t consider them respectable jobs until we needed one.
I think we need to go to a system such as the one you proposed. Some people have talents that are pure genius in fields such as woodworking or welding but they’re made to feel worthless because they can’t do trigonometry in their head.
Seriously, few have issues with teaching the basic biology. It teaching 12 year olds how to put condoms on bananas that people pissed off.
The PARENTS need to take sex ed class that will teach THEM how to teach their kids about it. The responsibility of falls back on the PARENTS until the kids are no longer minors. Do you know where your preteen/teenage son or daughter is when you’re not around? It’s all about COMMUNICATING the old-fashioned way: TALKING. Not texting, instant messaging, tweeting, emailing, blogging or facebooking. TALK.
Federal “Child Labor” laws were lobbied for in the US from the 1880s-1930 unsuccessfully to curb abuses, and such as were passed were found mostly unconstitutional. Child labor was finally regulated and mostly banned as part of the New Deal and Roosevelt’s eventual packing of an expansive Supreme Court (8 of the 9 justices over 12 years), not as a means of protecting children, but to remove them from the contracted job market of the Great Depression in order to open job slots for unemployed heads of households. When the job market finally opened up during World War II, women, who effectively became heads of households while their men were away in the military, took the available jobs. Then after WWII, the post-war economic expansion saw the evolution of two-worker families, the husband and the wife, rather than the father and older children. Depression-era child labor laws continued in force, not to keep teenagers from taking jobs needed by heads of households, but as a means of extending and sanctifying the idol of the childhood idyll, which had the unintended consequence of infantilizing generation after generation, making growing up and taking responsibility ever more elusive and teens ever more idle.
So there you have it all in one paragraph, the history of the deconstruction of American initiative and work-ethic inculcated from an early age. (And I love to use language, like using idol and juxtaposing idyll and idle all in one sentence. I should be President ;-)
Woah! You have a pretty good idea there!
Really? Which industrialized countries? What are the figures?
About 820,000 girls become pregnant before they turn 20.
That is not neccesarily a bad thing. Teens are having sex. There is no doubt about that, so does it help that the government will not fund a sex education program that teaches safe sex? 75 percent of parents say they would like their children to be taught both abstinence and safe sex. Yet, one-third of American high schools are teaching abstinence-only sex education. Other schools avoid the subject altogether. If sex education began in middle school and involved the topic of safe sex, the rate of teen pregnancies and STDs might be lower.
It might be lower. On the other hand it might encourage experimentation and therefore make it much higher. It might make no difference at all (in which case you have just wasted a great deal of time and money).
Nothing can be done to stop teens from having sex.
I'm sure that the hyper-efficient liberal media machine put their minds to it that would certainly not be impossible.
According to the Center for Disease Control, 46.7 percent of U.S. high school students say they've had sex at least once during high school. Many middle school students are also admitting to engaging in oral sex.
How gullible are these people? There is a world of difference between what impressionable kids say they have done and what they actually do.
Teaching safe sex would not be encouraging students to have sex, but rather to be safe if they do choose to so.
Nonsense. That is one of the biggest lies going. The main reasoning behind "safe sex" is that you can have sex without any negative consequence. How is that not going to encourage more sex? The mechanics of the incidence of pregnancy and venereal disease are direct and very simple. The more sex you have, the more pregnancies and the higher the incidence of venereal disease. This is so obvious I feel stupider having to write it down.
Perhaps the rate of teen pregnancies and STDs would not be so high if teens knew how to use a condom, or better yet, what a condom is.
No perhaps about it. It will make it higher. The lie to this statistic is very subtle. Knowing how to use preventative measures like condoms WILL lower your chance of becoming pregnant or contracting an STD, per time you have sex. But because using these devices encourages you to think that you are in control of the situation, and therefore you have more sex, with more people, in which case, the direct correlation of more sex = more pregnancies and more STD's I described above kicks in.
In middle school, the only sex education I got was watching disgusting slides of STDs and hearing that if I have sex I'll get pregnant. Everyone in the school got the same classes, yet girls were still getting pregnant in middle school.
Immaterial. Modern day schools in the UK get vast amounts of sex education and the teenage pregnancy rate is going through the roof. STD's are by far the most common infectious diseases going.
The scare tactic did not work. Teaching safe sex will not solve the problem of teen pregnancy and STDs, but I do think it will lessen it.
If the US implements this sex education strategy liberals like the author will no doubt be overjoyed, and then be utterly puzzled in ten years time when the rates still keep climbing. Their answer will probably be even more sex education. Anything rather than admitting the obvious truth - IT DOESN'T WORK. I think they have some kind of allergy to math.
If teens are aware of the risks of having sex, as well as how to be safe, they are more likely to be smart about it.
Having sex for teenagers is an emotional, experimental thing. Reason rarely enters into it. As a matter of fact, reason rarely enters into most things that they do.
The dirty little secret is that the incidence of teen and tween sex is correlated to the openness and availability of adult sex. What adults do and how much it is seen in movies, music and magazines filters down. Take it out of the media and restrict adult behavior and you will see youth go likewise.
But we won’t see that, will we?
So the next best thing is to grow them up faster and hand them the responsibilities of adulthood earlier rather than coddling and enabling.
I hope so much that you are wrong, because that is very much a sub-optimal solution to our cultural problems.
I dropped out an got a GED too.
I couldn’t stand school. I would rather have spent those years working in a sweatshop, at least I would have make a few bucks. ;)
Made.
There should not be the slightest doubt that I’m right.
I offered two solutions. (restrictions on adult’s “speech” and activities and/or younger adult responsibilities)
Which do you think is better?
By restrictions on “speech”, I mean recriminalizing all porn and suggestive images.
By restrictions on activities, I mean recriminalizing adultery and making divorce more difficult.
By adult responsibilities, I mean shorter schooling, 10 instead of 12 years for many and the possibility of unrestricted work, emancipation and marriage at 15 or 16.
An end to evading responsibility through abortion goes without saying.
“The better question is should public schools still exist.”
Good question, and the answer is for parents to stop using them.
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