The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Sex, Drugs and … Fifth-Graders?

Posted on | September 15, 2011 | 11 Comments

The Associated Press reports:

District of Columbia public schools are planning to test students on their knowledge of human sexuality, contraception and drug use this spring.
According to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, the exam will be the first standardized test on health and sex education in the country. The 50-question exam will be given to students in grades 5, 8 and 10.
The city’s rates of childhood obesity, sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy are among the highest in the country. School officials say the test will help determine what students know about risky behavior.

Do the students lack knowledge or do they lack virtue?

This is my longstanding general objection to sex education, per se.

We live in an age where knowledge about “human sexuality” has never been more available, even to fifth-graders, and yet when liberals see high rates of “sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy” — i.e., health statistics betokening widespread promiscuity among youth — they immediately suggest sex education as the remedy.

The simplest disproof of the Liberal Theory of Sex Education is to ask whether problems related to adolescent fornication were more or less frequent in 1948, when there was little if any sex education in school and the Comstock Act was still generally enforced.

Yet liberals apparently believe that teaching kids the Latin names of reproductive organs (shown in cross-section anatomical charts of the pelvis) and other such things will somehow lead to a reduction of “risky behavior.” But let us apply their theory to another problem mentioned in the AP article, childhood obesity.

Certainly D.C. schools teach children the usual stuff about nutrition, caloric intake, metabolic processes, carbohydrates, protein, et cetera. And in a classroom of 20 fifth-graders, these lessons are taught equally to all. But despite this universality of nutritional education, some students are still fat while others are skinny.

We see from this example that the mere imparting of dietary knowledge is not a sufficient remedy to the problem of childhood obesity. By analogy, we ought to realize that neither will mere sexual knowledge fix the problems arising from adolescent promiscuity.

Sex education fails in practice because it is wrong in theory.

The entire rationale for sex education in public schools is mistaken, and details of the curriculum are trivial in comparison to the enormous intellectual error by which the schools justify sex education in the first place. And yet the acolytes of error nowadays are such an overwhelming majority of administration and faculty that anyone who might dare question the Liberal Theory of Sex Education is intimidated into silence.

Those who are skeptical toward sex education (as is true with skeptics of anything beloved by liberals) are categorically dismissed as ignorant, backward and prejudiced.

To be against sex education is to be an uptight prude, hopelessly old-fashioned, quite likely some sort of Religious Fundamentalist, and perhaps even an enemy of Scientific Progress.

Facts and logic debunking the Liberal Theory of Sex Education are simple to produce (I’m not yet 500 words into this blog post) and yet few will raise their voices to object to this waste of taxpayer money, because they fear being stigmatized for objecting. Therefore Wrong and Error triumph because the would-be forces of Truth and Right lack the most important virtue of all — courage.

What kids need to know about sex can be summarized in four simple English words: “Keep your britches on.” No Latin phrases required.

If grown-ups had enough courage to speak the truth, we could send the Professional Sex Educators to the unemployment office, where perhaps they can be retrained to do something genuinely useful with their lives.

Category: Education, Liberals, Sex

Comments

11 Responses to “Sex, Drugs and … Fifth-Graders?”

  1. Anonymous
    September 16th, 2011 @ 3:09 am

    Stacey, sad but true: my mother was a 4th grade teacher in rural Alabama. There were ~100 students in 4th grade. It was a guarantee that at least one would become pregnant per year.

    There are three interlocking explanations:

    1. Do not imagine that 4th grade meant 10-11 year olds. A minimum of half the class had been flunked the maximum of once at every grade. 90% of them had been flunked at least once in 4 grades.

    2. Young girls are beginning puberty earlier every year. This is probably related to the fact that our overwhelming nutrition level has convinced female body chemistry that now is the time to bear young, while there’s plenty to feed them on.

    3. 90% of them were the product of 2 and 3 generation welfare families. There’s no reason to delay when you know you and the kid will be taken care of.

  2. Dianna Deeley
    September 16th, 2011 @ 3:19 am

    “Do the students lack knowledge or do they lack virtue?”

    Virtue, without a doubt. Knowledge, without virtue, is empty. As anyone who thinks about it for one second can quite clearly see.

    Not being a huge practitioner of virtue, at least in my youth, I am quite clear on where the problem lies.

  3. It’s like the SAT – Sex Assessment Testing! at Haemet
    September 16th, 2011 @ 12:05 am

    […] Stacy McCain reports that Washington DC schoolchildren will be tested on their knowledge of human sexuality and drug use – starting in the fifth grade.  As he correctly points out, knowledge is not virtue, and it is the latter, not the former, which young people lack, and which is so necessary for avoiding sex and drugs.  Furthermore, the expansion of sexual knowledge – from “sex ed” to the internet, how-to books, and a very permissive society – has coincided with the increase in bad decision-making, such as early intercourse, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, a high incidence of STDs, and more numerous sexual partners. […]

  4. Roxeanne de Luca
    September 16th, 2011 @ 4:08 am

    2. Young girls are beginning puberty earlier every year. This is
    probably related to the fact that our overwhelming nutrition level has
    convinced female body chemistry that now is the time to bear young,
    while there’s plenty to feed them on.

    But it’s changed even from ten or twenty years ago.  Back in the early ’90s, when I was a wee lass in middle school, most girls were in six or seventh grade.  Now fifth grade is not uncommon.  I think it’s not just nutrition, but lack of exercise: female athletes take longer.

  5. Matthew Gray
    September 16th, 2011 @ 4:31 am

    “The simplest disproof of the Liberal Theory of Sex Education is to ask whether problems related to adolescent fornication were more or less frequent in 1948, when there was little if any sex education in school and the Comstock Act was still generally enforced.”

    That’s your disproof?  A question you don’t answer?

    Even if you had answered it, you still don’t have much of a disproof.  The closest year to 1948 I can find data for is 1950.  That year the birth rate for mothers 15-19 was 81.6 per 1000.  In 2006 it was 42 per 1000.  

  6. M Simon
    September 16th, 2011 @ 6:09 am

    In colonial times the rate of shotgun weddings was 1 out of 3. What is different now? Women don’t need a man to keep them in groceries.

    And what is one of the biggest problems (other than welfare)?

    Republican girly men:

    http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/11/why-republicans-will-not-shrink-government.html

    And then we have the Feminist gulag for men:

    http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/culture/family/2705-feminist-gulag-no-prosecution-necessary

    So government is now women’s protector. No MEN need apply.

  7. M Simon
    September 16th, 2011 @ 6:14 am

    Encourage abortion or encourage welfare. Tough choices.

  8. How Much Sex Do Fifth-Graders Know? « Truth Before Dishonor
    September 16th, 2011 @ 2:51 am

    […] they obviously don’t know enough, at 11 years old, about being safely sexually active. But as RS McCain points out, it wasn’t a heavy amount of knowledge teens had in 1948 but rather a much stronger moral […]

  9. Datechguy's Blog » Blog Archive » Da Rules: No Booze, No Drugs, No sex
    September 16th, 2011 @ 12:02 pm

    […] sound old fashioned, a product of my parents being from the 20′s but Stacy McCain asks the relevant question. The simplest disproof of the Liberal Theory of Sex Education is to ask whether problems related to […]

  10. Roxeanne de Luca
    September 16th, 2011 @ 5:31 pm

    Matthew: “birth rate for women ages 15-19” encompasses everything from a fifteen-year-old high school freshman to a married 19-year-old who is attending college with her baby.  A more useful statistic would be women who get pregnant in high school, or unmarried women who have children. 

    Hell, my mother was 19 when she got pregnant; she married my father, and, thirty-mumble years later, she’s now a BMW-driving small business owner, and my sister and I are college-educated professional women.  Surely, you cannot compare that situation with a fifteen-year-old who is pregnant!

  11. Datechguy's Blog » Blog Archive » The knowledge of virtue
    September 16th, 2011 @ 2:21 pm

    […] In Stacy McCain’s excellent treatise on the problems with “sex ed” and the liberal….   That excellent question misses another issue: young people often lack the knowledge of virtue and cannot determine what is a virtue and what is a vice. […]