Sex-Ed
Sex is one of the basic functions for animals. The passing on of genes is important to most animals in the worlds. Some animals kill the offspring of others to ensure their genes have a better chance of surviving. Survival of the fittest at its core. This is true until you get to us humans. We have gotten away from sex as purely procreative. This is for several reasons. One being the typical human requires much more resources. Babies have to be fed, clothed, entertained, educated, and cleaned. All those things require money and more importantly, time and energy. So, there is a limit on how many kids a man and woman can have (for the Dugans its 19). But we are built to enjoy sex at it is out primal goal to reproduce. So this brings us humans to a point where we enjoy it for the act and not always for the possible results.
Now you may have a completely different view on sex, but we have to ask ourselves a few questions. Are the people in charge of teaching your (future) children teaching them what you want them to be taught? Are their views in line with yours? Are your kids going to come away with the right (and complete) understanding of sex?
Now I’m sure you’re wondering on why a mid-20’s guy with no plans to have kids in the near future is asking these questions. Well I recently read a story on CNN where a study was done on people 18-29 about their knowledge of sex. An overwhelming majority of the participants demonstrated a lack of knowledge of sex. Forty percent of the participants answered that they “didn’t feel birth controlled mattered. You get pregnant when it is ‘your time’.”
This study (which was done on single, unmarried people) found 63% of the people didn’t know about the pill, and 20% didn’t know about condoms (as much as I hate them, I know all about those things). And why would they when 18% of the men in the study thought that standing up during sex would prevent pregnancy. Maybe this is why 42% of the men admitted they were probably going to have sex within the next three months without protection. That’s 2 out of every 5 guys. Hopefully this study isn’t an accurate cross-cut of the demographic I belong to.
The article suggests that the reason is due to a lack of sexual education. I am inclined to agree with this. The people who conducted the study feel that the increase in sex-ed is the answers. They include places, like your job, which should be a place where sex-ed should be introduced. Now, this is where I begin to disagree. Sex-education as a school subject may be the problem.
First, most kids they aren’t interested in most school subjects. School is a “drag” (I feel old saying that). But more importantly there isn’t a teacher’s edition with all the answers on sex. Secondly, if this survey is any indication, teachers (especially young ones) don’t have a great knowledge on the subject as it is. Lastly, sex-ed cannot cover everything about sex.
Sex-ed as a school subject is a backwards idea. Kids in school care about getting good grades. When I was in sex-ed there wasn’t a test. So, I zoned out for the most part (I was very focused when boobies were on screen). There was no test. There was no landmark on what a child should know. And if there were test, most things dealing with sex isn’t a plain and clear cut as a multiple choice or true false questions. Now the people who are teaching our kids have a degree in something. Odds are it isn’t in sex. Most of these teachers teach from a book combined with their personal experience. Seeing on how most teaches don’t have the same sexual experiences, its very easy for kids to get mixed messages and get confused. So lets be realistic, you can’t teach everything about sex in a classroom, or the job. It’s a parent’s job.
