Joe Carter at First Things argues that American sex education is not education at all:
Unless the middle school in Shenandoah, Iowa, is training junior gynecologists, it is unclear why its eighth-graders need to be taught how to perform female exams and to put a condom on a 3-D, anatomically correct, male sex organ.
The representative from Planned Parenthood, which provided the instruction, justified the curriculum by saying, "All information we use is medically accurate and science based." For them, sexual education can be denuded of all moral content as long as research studies and reams of statistics back up their claims.
The advocates of "comprehensive sex education" want teenagers to "just wear a condom." Planned Parenthood's amoral appeal to "science" shows why that fails: medically accurate and science-based information doesn't give children any idea how to use that information, while it makes them think they can do what they want if only they practice the "safe sex" techniques they've been taught. But I don't think the abstinence advocates' "Just say no" is always an improvement.
Both types of programs are equally flawed and flawed in the same way. Each indoctrinates the children in a particular viewpoint and tries to inoculate them against the negative results of sexual behavior. Neither school of sex educators is primarily concerned with providing an education.
Carter goes on to argue that sex education should include three broad themes. The first is the purpose of sex. Carter writes:
Is sex mainly for pleasure? For bonding? For procreation? For all three, and if so in what proportion? Which is primary? Is sex a gift from a benevolent Creator or merely blind evolution's way of tricking us into passing on our genetic material? Students must be helped to ask these types of questions before they begin the other discussions.
If, for example, we are nothing but gene transmitters, do we have a reason to value monogamy? Do other evolutionary imperatives, like the maintenance of a stable community, require certain restrictions on sexual behavior? If one of the main purposes of sex is procreation, must we accept responsibility for any children that might be conceived as a result of our behavior, and are we limited in the number of people with whom we can bear children?
The rest of his piece is equally good. Check it out.
It's my opinion that one of the biggest failings of the contemporary church is it's failure to tackle this issue head on. I am mystified as to how we can put our children through confirmation classes and teach them all about church doctrine and history but ignore what may be the single most important aspect of growing up in today's society: the nature of love and the proper purpose of their sexuality. It is for many young people the single toughest issue with which they struggle, and we often leave it to the culture to instill in them the assumptions and attitudes they hold about it.
That seems to me to be gross irresponsibility.
It's also a major reason, perhaps, why the church is often considered irrelevant by young people. It doesn't come to grips with the questions of deepest importance to their lives, it largely ignores the cultural waters they swim in, and if it should assay to dip a toe into those waters it often does so in a very tentative and superficial way.
It may be the biggest failing of the church in the last sixty years.
RLC
