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.
