While driving to a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day on Tuesday I happened to hear part of this Talk of the Nation piece on sex education in public schools. Thought y’all might be interested as well.
Since I didn’t go to public school, I didn’t get sex ed in a school setting. We did get a series on relationship stuff at my church — very basic communication and decision-making skills that I remember being more embarrassing and boring than actual harmful or helpful. Thankfully, I had parents who were willing to talk and a voracious interest in reading about sexual health and human sexuality. So I don’t feel I missed much. But obviously not everyone is in the same kind of situation! Even today, in my thirties, I’m surprised by the persistent misconceptions about human sexuality that surface in peer-to-peer conversations.
What was your experience with sexuality education as a young person? Positives? Negatives? If you’ve got kids, what kind of sexuality education do you want for them, and are you able to find it?
The people who are hand-wringing about this program should be hand-wringing about the fact that NYC’s rate of pregnancy and STDs among teens is incredibly high. It’s a serious public health issue that affects society at every level, and it’s been consistently shown that the only effective way to deal with this problem is through comprehensive sex ed that starts in elementary school. People who keep pushing a head-in-the-sand moralizing approach (aka “abstinence-only”) need to STFU and STFD because they’re just part of the problem.
Like Anna, I grew up in a family where sex and sexuality was discussed openly (I got a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves from my mom when I was a teen). The public school system I went to had a good sex ed program that started out with the biological (how human reproduction works) and moved up to sex abuse prevention in elementary school, and then into the bigger health issues (birth control and STDs) in junior high and high school. Thinking back, I probably would have liked there to be more discussions about responsibility, peer pressure, and how to be more empowered to make decisions, but overall, I think it was a good program. I went to a high school with many kids whose parents came from cultures where discussing sex was taboo, and had it not been for what they were taught in public school sex ed, they’d have gotten no information at all about sex beyond what they learned from their peers.
My experience was positive. It was my father who taught me about periods and the emotional components of sex (like how sex and love can be separate). He also bought books for my brother and me. My mother never had these discussions with me, but she did buy condoms for me.
My school education was nonexistent. I remembered a couple of lectures in middle school 9this was in rural Georgia) and that was it. Of course it only focused on the negative consequences for females, like pregnancy and “bad reputation.” Even our health classes never talked about sex. They were mostly focused on drug prevention. There’s definitely a need for education, considering the number of teen pregnancies in my high school.
Interestingly enough, every male I’ve been in a relationship with has had no sex education from their parents, and little to none from their schools. Some of them grew up in religious households were those sorts of things were never discussed. I find that scary. I also wonder if females get at least a little more education just because they have to be taught about periods and what they mean.
My school system at least made an effort. They had the “Family Life” program which started with three days in fourth or fifth grade and worked up to 2 weeks in eighth grade, and then we had 2 or 3 weeks in Health, which was a tenth grade class. Health was okay–nothing spectacular, but we got the usual laundry list of STDs and contraceptive methods in addition to the anatomy/physiology stuff. I can’t remember if we talked about abortion. If we did it was only in the most abstract terms. There was no LGBT education. My school paid lip service to abstinence-only, which manifested in some rather weird ways. No sex acts were described other than PIV and the occasional mention that oral can give you STDs too. They showed us contraceptives in their wrappers, but neither we nor the teachers were allowed to handle them. The most insidious aspect, looking back, was the communication section. We learned twenty different ways to say “no,” (it was rather like DARE that way), but no strategies for giving or getting consent or even how to tell when someone else gives consent.
The elementary and middle school curriculum was pretty basic. We got “self-esteem,” “peer pressure,” “communication,” and a chance to label diagrams of the naughty bits. The upper grades got a bit more about preventing abuse. They were pretty hit-or-miss also; I remember lots of good information on how to tell if a relationship is unhealthy and also a very victim-blamey video about date rape.
My parents answer to Rev. and Mrs. They’re not fundies, so I was spared the hellfire talks, but I think they hoped that if they closed their eyes and wished real hard the sex thing would never become an issue. Incidentally, they want grandkids, so I’m not sure how well-advised that strategy was;)
Then I discovered Scarleteen, thank God. I hope it’s still around when my hypothetical kids come of age, because I have no idea how the sex talk is supposed to go.