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For the longest time the left has used the education system to attempt to hijack the next generation’s beliefs on numerous social issues. Using the pulpit of the school teacher’s classroom, the public school system espouses the values of the Secular Humanist, knowing that if they are patient, the seed that they are planting every day will bring forth fruit.
And in most cases it has paid off well for them.
However, there is one sector that they’ve actually lost ground—and that is in the area of abortion. Younger people consistently poll more pro-life than their parents. I believe that this is partially because the linkage between pro-choice and feminism isn’t as strong with the current generation as it was with the previous, but I also believe that we can credit some of it to the fact that this generation has been influenced by more teaching about what truly is inside the mother’s womb.
You see, when you have a “comprehensive sex education” you don’t simply have discussion of abstinence and various other types of birth control, you have discussions about abortion. In order to discuss abortion as an alternative to child bearing, you have to phrase the discussion as saying that it’s a moral choice.
With abstinence based education, the storyline is clear—it’s not that the young lady is just avoiding getting pregnant, it’s that pregnancy represents life. The focus is on the life inside the woman.
The focus of “comprehensive” is on the girl and her choices.
This is the fundamental struggle, and part of the reason that the pro-choice side is fighting so hard to get abstinence based education out of schools. They realize they are losing the hearts and minds of the next generation, and they don’t like it.
i don’t mind teaching about abstinence, as long as other basic forms of contraception are discussed. Since I don’t consider abortion a form of regular contraception, that need not be included.
People want abstinence only education out because study after study says it doesn’t work. look at where your highest numbers of teenage pregnancies are: the south, where abstinence only programs abound. If you can show peer-reviewed studies that say it works, then people may come around. The real science (not the science touted by WorldNetDaily) says it’s a failure.
@Musicguy: It actually depends on what you define as “work” and “success”.
If you define as work “produces less sex/pregnancies” then you have a good metric to state your thesis. However, if you are trying to teach the truth about what a baby is and personal responsibility, teaching kids that it’s ok to play because there are ways to avoid pregnancy doesn’t “work.” In encourages a behavior that leads to pregnancy or disease.
The question is what a particular style of education teaches about human life. Comprehensive education teaches that a pregnancy is something that is bad and to be avoided. It’s a disease. Is this something that’s positive?
What studies do not take into account is the fact that the culture is the problem, not the abstinence based education. The culture uses sex to sell dog food and House Insurance. They glorify the sleep around culture, and they discourage positive families. When the culture, family, peers, and other classes say one thing and the health class says another, what is to blame for the teen pregnancy? The curriculum?
I agree that success depends on how you define it. It seems to me that sex education has a few obvious goals: reducing teen pregnancy, reducing STD’s among teens, and helping teens understand human sexuality and its role in their lives and our society. As you point out, there does not appear to be a correlation between “secular humanist” sex education and pro-life attitudes, but that is not a goal of sex education anyway. Students should be given the facts and make their own decisions.
When you blame the culture for the highly sexualized nature of our society, you are missing the point slightly. Our culture is not generated from family, church, and heritage, it is generated by corporations motivated by greed. Sex is used to sell because it works and makes a lot of money for corporations. The movies and TV present lots of promiscuous sex because that sells tickets and boost ratings and makes a lot of money for corporations.
If conservative Christians were serious about changing our culture, they would not yoke themselves to right-wing politicians who are committed to an unregulated market where corporations get everything they want.
@Charles: It’s pretty easy to measure teen pregnancy, I think it’s harder to calculate the STD set. Let alone try to figure out cause. Part of the point I was trying to make is that you cannot say these education classes operate in a vacuum with no other stimuli, so to me, it’s hard to judge effectiveness. The fact that many of the students come out of an abstinence based class pledging virginity means (to me) that they know it’s desirable, even if they aren’t going to follow through.
I’m not sure that I agree with students being “given the facts [to] make their own decisions.” Personally, I think sex ed is tied with the home and family values. I’m not sure that the government has the right to interfere with the value judgments of students, because implicit in the training that “if you’re going to do it, make sure you use protection” is the philosophy that (1) You’re a teen, you’re going to do it and (2) everyone’s doing it, so you’re going to look foolish if you don’t.
The culture has been influenced by corporations that are catering to lust. If it didn’t sell, corporations would find a different way to make money. It’s cyclical, and it feeds off of each other. Although this is not always the case– look at movies and ratings and you’ll see that G rated movies make the most money, but films strive for a PG-13 rating. Adult enough without getting the bad boy R. It all depends on your target audience and what they like. If people changed, the corporations would change.
I disagree with the last statement, however. I’d rather have a culture with freedom than a culture that tells you what to think or do. The problem with a culture that mandates what companies and people do or say is that when the person that you want is in power everything’s rosy, but when you’re out of power it is you that are being told to be silent. Freedom has to be freedom for even those that you disagree with otherwise it is not freedom. It’s tyranny.
Human sexuality is simply biology and perhaps some psychology, making moral decisions about whether to engage in sexual activity is a different thing altogether. In order to make a responsible moral decision you need the facts, and that’s where sex ed comes in. By the time they reach the age where they are likely to be sexual, their family has already instilled whatever moral code they have and knowing more about sexuality is not going to alter that.
Freedom is important, and individuals in a free society must have the freedom to speak their minds. A corporation however, is not a person. It is a legal entity chartered by the government. A corporation should not have the rights the Constitution grants to citizens because it is not a person. You can’t lock up a corporation for theft, and in any kind of arena, the corporation will always have a tremendous advantage over individual citizens and even groups of citizens. That’s why our government ignores the will of the people and bends over backwards to give corporations whatever they want. It’s not a level playing field.
@Charles: I would believe that part of the psychology involves morality. Your second sentence is a fallacy, as proved by your third sentence.
If a corporation is caught stealing, the leaders of that corporation are put in prison. The Constitution ensures freedom of assembly, and that’s not simply for having a cook-out. You can assemble for business purposes, but if you choose to align yourself with a group of people, you are also responsible for being a part. It’s like being an accomplice.