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Sex and the Sanctity of Love: Beyond Biology
| Article
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16839 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1989 |
4,661 Words |
| Author
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Coleen K. Mast
Coleen K. Mast is the author of Sex Respect: the Option of the
True Sexual Freedom (Bradley, Ill, Respect Inc.), a health
education text for public schools and Love and Life: A
Christian Sexual Morality Guide for Teens (San Francisco:
Ignatius), for parochial schools. An educational consultant
with a master's degree in health education, she has taught at
the elementary, junior high, and high school levels. Mast has
been profiled in the 1978 and 1985 editions of Outstanding
Young Women of America. |
I understood his concern. A teacher at the local public high school, he had been assigned the task of teaching sex education to freshman students. He was dissatisfied with the standard materials that had been provided to him. Their focus on the biology of sexual intercourse and the mechanics of contraception, and their value-free approach troubled him. He wanted to know how far beyond biology he was allowed to go in his classroom, without violating state and board of education guidelines and without offending parents.
As a public health educator, I was familiar with the uncertainties that this teacher was expressing. Educators have become confused about what values, if any, they may present in their classes. After all, modern adults take pride in not forcing their own values on younger minds. In today's marketplace of ideas, it is assumed that all viewpoints must be treated as equally acceptable. Since there seems to be no moral consensus, who is the teacher to think he can determine what values his students should be taught? And who is the teacher to show disapproval of sexual behaviors that are, to the modern mind, simply other options from which his students may choose? Who is the teacher to define what constitutes "normal" sexuality, "pornography," or "immorality"? It would appear that there is little else left to teach other than the impersonal facts. As for values, the students must decide for themselves what constitutes the most "comfortable" choice.
And yet, this approach to sex education strikes many educators as an inadequate description of the richness of human sexuality. Further, many educators have discovered that the kind of curriculum that this high school teacher had described to me is not very successful in attaining the hoped-for goals of decreasing pregnancy and sexual activity among high school students. The popular agenda of sex education is not directed to the human need for harmony and fulfillment in love, but to the pleasure ethic of hedonisms, with a passing glance at a committed, monogamous relationship as one of many options. Indeed, such an approach to sex education seems to have increased the very problems that it had hoped to solve. Can't we offer anything better to our young people?
We not only can but must offer something better, by providing a crucial element missing from the majority of sex education programs. Our adolescents need to know more than the biology and physiology of sex; they need to know its meaning. Instead, we are too often teaching these vulnerable youngsters half-truths, distorting their view of human sexuality and offending their dignity by omitting those concerns
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