Not only do I think that sex education should be essential study in school, I think we need more of it and it needs to be tiered and progressive over the course of middle school and high school by a specially selected and certified teacher with current materials. Not just the health teacher by default using the class text.
(Side Commentary: My health teacher in jr high was the least relatable member of faculty and I cannot imagine a worse possible person to be teaching sex education to 14-year olds. High school was slightly better but was somewhat traumatic when we watched a video of a woman giving birth in a bath tub. If the T.V. show “Wonder Years” covered sex education in an episode they could have gotten plenty of material from my personal experience.)
For many decades, sex education has been used to prevent sexual activity among adolescents, but I don’t think that it has been very successful in doing so. This means kids are going to have sex. It doesn’t matter what type of education is utilized from parents or the school system, it’s going to happen on a significant scale and I think they should have the tools necessary to understand sex in an all-encompassing way. These kids need to understand the consequences and how it affects relationships in a contemporary, modern approach that is frequently revised.
In addition to a change to typical sex education, I think that pornography and masturbation needs to be addressed more directly as well in these classes as well. We don’t live in a time where boys are out in the woods hiding with a couple of issues of Playboy. We live in a time where websites like Pornhub showcase fetishes involving “step mothers” or worse without any sort of access gateway. You don’t have to steal your uncle’s stash anymore. It’s all just a google search away and the fetishes add a dangerous aspect of specificity to it. In addition to these glaring details, there is also the issue of instant gratification. Please see the outline below from
Every second, $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography on the internet and Americans spend $15 billion annually
Every second, 28,258 users are watching pornography on the internet
• Every second, 372 people are typing the word “adult” into search engines
• 40 million Americans regularly visit porn sites and one in three are women
• 35% of all internet downloads are related to pornography
• 25% of all search engine queries are related to pornography, or about 68 million search queries a day
• Search engines get 116,000 queries daily related to child pornography
• The most popular porn site is getting 4.4 billion page views per month
• 34% of internet users have experienced unwanted exposure to pornography through pop up ads, misdirected links or emails
• Every 39 minutes a new pornography video is created in the U.S.
• About 200,000 Americans are addicted to porn
• 70% of men and 30% of women spend an average of 12 minutes on a porn site 7.5 times/month compared to 3 minutes or less for other sites
• 66% of employee work computers have visited porn sites and this increases to 100% for men in their twenties.
I don’t know how effective teaching anything about this sex education and modern use of pornography will do in the class room but from my experience (between 1994-1998) it was antiquated and I’m doubtful it’s any better now. However, I think it’s worthwhile to explore. Although not all programs are successful, it is understood that some of them are effective in terms of promoting abstinence and education. (Sex education in schools: its effects on sexual behavior, 1995)
Rosch, P. J. (2016). What Do You See in the Future? Health & Stress,Vol 28(2), 6-19. Retrieved September 19, 2018.
Sex education in schools: its effects on sexual behavior. (1995). HealthFacts, 20(196), 6.
John Hickman 