Sex education is all about teaching young people about sex and how to protect themselves from undesirable outcomes like unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease (STD). So to see parents outraged at sex education at school because it is more than vague and general does leave people wondering what is driving this generally destructive behavior of desiring ignorance.
Learning about sex and reproduction is basic to all people. After all the purpose of life is to make more life, as that is what all living things do from the simplest bacteria up to the highest order of life. Sex education is all about placing some electiveness in that process and not letting nature run amok with our lives.
In general the more a person knows about anything, the more control they have. For example if a person gets cancer, they set about educating themselves about that particular type of cancer to learn the best way to survive. They learn about what makes the cancer worse, and what slows it down or stops it. They study all the treatment options and so on until they become the ultimate expert on that type of cancer. But to let their children learn about sex, it is an entirely different reaction.
In general it is fairly easy to understand some of the motives behind that negative reaction, and all of them stem from ignorance. Some parents feel sex is dirty, while others say the education is too explicit. But then again some of those parents have been taught to avoid pregnancy by placing a watermelon seed between their knees. In some cases religion plays a part in this, but in reality religion has nothing to do with sex other than attempting to restrict it one way or the other.
Some parents prefer not to think that people under the age of 18 are having sex. They are thinking that because there are age of consent laws or because they never did it themselves it will not happen. The fact of the matter is nature has much more to do with sex than people want to admit. That is particularly true as to when sexual thoughts and desires start.
If we were to remove all of today’s modern medicine including even the very basic aspirin, we would not live much longer than 45 to 50 years. We would be at the mercy of just about everything. Imagine what would happen if we had a simple cut that got infected and there was no antibiotics to treat it. Think about how many people died in the trenches of World War I from just such of an infection. Because of that, nature makes us ready to procreate between 10 and 14 years old so we don’t become extinct.
So if nature is at work drawing young teens together with the end goal of having sex to have a baby, it does make sense to do a proper job about educating them. It is this very detailed education that seems to be a sticking point. For some reason there is the underlying thought ‘If they don’t know about it, they won’t do it’. That may be true with things that have nothing to do with nature, but not with our primary function of procreation.
It is best to point out there are two steps in sex education. Step 1 is all about the egg meets the sperm thing, and that is more biology than sexual behavior. That is all fine and good for children who have not entered puberty. Step 2 is all about the sexual act, and that is causing the uproar.
To discuss the importance of washing before and after sex, the use of a condom or other methods of protection, illustrations of sexual behavior that includes oral sex and illustrations of basic sexual positions and the ‘How to’ is a bit much for some parents. They seem to equate education with pornography and that is not the case. The illustrations are meant to prompt questions that otherwise would not have been asked. By properly answering those questions, it eliminates getting the answers in a much more risky situation of a sexual act or an after the fact pregnancy or STD. Whether a parent objects to the more explicit sex education or not, the fact remains their children will be experiencing or have already experienced the things being taught.
So the absurdity of not educating children about sex, and all the little particulars, simply amounts to placing children in harms way knowing full well that sooner or later they will find themselves having sex with or without knowledge about sex. China until recently had little or no sex education and certainly that contributed to their huge population. Their only motive to start sex education was because of the rapid spread of HIV caused by not knowing about it or how to protect themselves.
If you look at a map of the world by country, the countries with the least sex education have the worst social conditions with unwanted pregnancies and higher number of cases of STD. All of that puts unnecessary pressure on local Government as well as the young people who found themselves part of the unfortunate statistics.
So in summary, any objection to factual sex education reflects sexual issues with the people that would object. Those problems can be religious based or simply thinking sex is somehow dirty and should not be talked about. Sex education is all about survival, so objecting to learning survival skills because of the name or nature of the topic provides evidence of just how much further we need to go in the development of society.
