LogFAQs > #974939809

adjl posted...

This is what bugs me about the "that's something parents should teach them!" argument against sex ed. If parents are teaching them, sure, it's redundant and you've wasted a bit of teaching time.

The problem with sex ed is that we usually teach it too late to do any good even when we do teach it. By the time I had it as a class in high school, there was already at least one girl in my grade who'd had a kid, and a fair few other kids who'd been having sex for a while. Most of us had already picked up all the pertinent details from friends or porn, and while we were aware of ideas like "safe sex" and "abstinence" and "you're going to ruin your life if you get pregnant as a teenager, you idiot", it's not like most of us were paying any real attention. Everyone assumes they're the indestructible main character when they're a kid - "That's never going to happen to me."

By the time even good parents think it's time to have "The Talk", their kid has probably picked up a ton of information already, and are mostly going to ignore whatever their parents want to talk about because "Yeah, I already know it all".

We basically need to try and teach kids early enough that it actually helps, but not so early that it's kind of meaningless to them (which means they won't internalize any of it). The ideal would be figuring out the perfect age to teach as well as the perfect way to teach it without being too clinical (which kids will ignore because it's boring or uncool) or too awkward (which kids will ignore because it's embarrassing).

Like with a lot of things in school, we shouldn't necessarily be teaching rote facts and details as much as encouraging ways of thinking. But that's a difficult teaching model to apply to sex ed as a concept.