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Sex Education: How to Respond
| Article
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16837 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1989 |
5,772 Words |
| Author
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Linus Wright
Linus Wright is a former undersecretary of the U.S.
Department of Education. From 1978 to 1987, he was
superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District.
Since 1989 he has served as president and chief executive
officer of Ideal Learning, Inc., an educational computer
software company located in Irving, Texas. |
Any parent who is not worried about the problem of sexual promiscuity among young people is either naïve or insensitive. More than one million teenage girls become pregnant each year; and of these, more than 400,000 have abortions and another 250,000 give birth out of wedlock.
Those statistics only begin to hint at the suffering, the sorrow, and the ruined lives that are the inevitable by-product of an increasingly permissive society. For every unmarried teenage couple "in trouble," there are usually two sets of parents, grandparents, and brothers and sisters, as well as family friends and schoolmates, who also suffer. There are also the children of such liaisons, surely the greatest sufferers of all and the most blameless.
But pregnancy is no longer the only worry among those concerned about teenage promiscuity. Sexually transmitted diseases increasingly pose a threat to the health and lives of those who engage in irresponsible sexual behavior, and young people are increasingly at risk. The permissiveness of American society over the past twenty years has exposed a generation of teenagers to a variety of medical dangers that were known in an earlier time only to the most jaded and irresponsible of adults. And there is no reason to believe that things are improving significantly. Indeed, some medical authorities predict that promiscuous conduct among young people will be even more dangerous in two years than it is today.
It is understandable that in the wake of such social devastation educators are attempting to devise ways in which the schools can help the family in this area--and the result has been a renewed push for required sex education in the classroom. In fact, legislatures in more than thirty states have mandated such courses as part of AIDS prevention programs; and in some cases these courses are prescribed for kindergarten through the twelfth grade.
The introduction of such courses has upset a number of people who believe in traditional moral and social values; and while I am a life-long believer in public schools, I sympathize with those parents who are reluctant to see the educational system assume the burden of sex education at this moment in our history. I have no objection to schools offering sex education of a certain sort. Indeed, I think such courses can perform a useful service to the community. For example, I see no reason why young people of thirteen and fourteen should not receive basic instruction on human sexuality in their biology classes. Taught in the same way that classes on other
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