I read your article “Touchy Topic: Experts and Parents Weigh In on Sex Education in Public Schools” [May 30, Xpress] with great environmental interest, since it will exclusively determine Buncombe soil and water quality and the Provincetown [Mass.] school tax. Of particular interest is the surprise that the Buncombe school system is ahead of the Asheville system in sex ed, despite Asheville not having viable fundamentalist opposition, unlike in Buncombe. This negates the main reason to preserve two independent systems.
My complaint is that you leave unchallenged the false assumption that sex ed is prerequisite to contraceptive ed, when this is only true of barrier and perhaps calendar-based methods. Hormonal methods, IUDs and surgical methods can be explained without, and therefore long before, any explicit knowledge of sex, and therefore well before any potential onset of fertility, which is an absolute deadline.
— Alan Ditmore
Leicester
Huh????
Government punishes success, subsidizes failure. As long as it pays for kids to have kids, you can teach safe sex and all the rest til hell freezes over. It won’t do a thing.
Just to clarify, “sex education” is an umbrella term that includes puberty, healthy relationships, consent, communication, STD risk reduction, reproductive anatomy, birth control, gender, orientation, HIV, boundaries, personal safety, online safety, bullying and more. Aligned with the National Sex Ed Standards, there are age appropriate topics for all age groupings, for instance k-2 includes stereotypes, friendships, safe body, anatomy and respecting boundaries.
Sex ed is not, as implied, tab A into slot B, and I wholly agree with the author that contraceptive education should be taught age-appropriately.
Megara Bell, director
Partners in Sex Education
LOL considering student rank in the world compared to per capita spent, maybe schools should like refocus their efforts into teaching instead of parenting. Oh I forgot, since government has been a stand in parent for decades now, they have no choice but to continue the insanity. How odd that teenage single mother rates exploded during the same time sex ed was standardized in school;s. One would think the opposite would occur but it hasn’t lulz. Better double up on more sex ed and also make sure they know where social services it too. And by far make it easy peasy to get on assistance with cash and prizes for contributing to societal decline. And then wonder why the byproducts of such policy can’t learn anything. And of course rally around poor teachers, who somehow choose these careers and then complain they aren’t paid enough. Well they would be if they were teaching instead of playing mommy too.
Amen brother!
All we need now is more government social engineering after nearly fifty years of devaluing the sanctity of the pillars of ” life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Somewhere along the way, the misguided folks have not heeded the lesson of,”if you keep doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, this is an early warning sign of insanity.” And, or “or” it could be simply that their paychecks are tied to this insanity.
The Social Engineers are likened to an investor who buys a stock in a company, watches the company lose value while using the dividends to buy more of the same stock all the while riding the stock down to the bottom. There is counseling available for this affliction known as anchoring or familiarity bias.
Teenage pregnancy and birthrates have been falling since about 1991. It looks like it spiked around the mid-50s and increased again around the late 80s. That seems to contradict your hypothesis since the 50s and 80s were rather conservative times in the US, and introduction of Sex-Ed into schools in the 60’s corresponded with a decline in teenage pregnancy overall.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/29/why-is-the-teen-birth-rate-falling/