Sex Education

For our presentation we told the class to read two articles. The one article was called "How to End the War Over Sex Ed." This article was about a county in South Carolina where they are teaching kids in an abstinence plus style meaning that they are teaching about abstinence and safe sex practices. For the program, a teacher administers two classes, one of which is based on sexuality and the other on decision-making skills. She teaches about STIs, pregnancy, contraceptives and also encourages them to delay sexual activity. This program runs from middle school throughout high school and they keep the same teacher throughout it. Because of this, the students can feel secure with this teacher and are able to ask her questions. This program appears to be effective since the birth rates at this school have decreased. Although this program seems to be working, it would be very expensive to implement it in lots of schools. The difference in this comprehensive program from previous ones that were not as successful is the new focus on behavior while emphasizing that not having sex is the safest choice.

In our second article, "Sex Ed in Washington," it discusses Bush's policy priority of abstinence-based sex education. After 15 years of a decline in birthrates, they increased earlier in this year. A lot of people blame the abstinence only programs but that is not logical. If you blame this increase on the programs, you must also give them credit for 15 years of improvement. This does not appear to be the case according to the data. In fact, the data indicate that neither abstinence only nor comprehensive are very effective at improving statistics. This article also says that the debate should be kept at a local level instead of requiring the federal government to make the decision for everyone.

Personally, I do not think that the second article's idea to decide on sex education programs locally would be very effective at improving statistics because it is hard to generalize values in any given area. Just because one area is typically more religious, it is not right to just assume that abstinence only is the way to go. Not everyone in that area is going to share the same values and so they need to be taught about other options. I think that the first article shows that a combination of promoting abstinence while also explaining safe sex practices is the best choice for everyone. If this combined program was implemented it would give students of all different values the encouragement to delay sexual activity as well as the information they needed in case they decided not to.

In my school, I did not receive much sex education. The only time I remember talking about sex in school was one year in my high school health class. This did not negatively affect me but I think that the high teen birth rates of my school indicate that the sex education needs some work. Because the school didn't provide us with adequate information, students had to rely on their parents. I do not think that this is a wise strategy because kids are often too embarrassed to talk to their parents about it and are too afraid to ask questions. Personally, I think that schools should be required to teach sex education. As of now, 17 states do not require this but I would like to think that this number will decrease over time.