Imagine you have a 10- or 11-year old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about nutrition, your child was given "risk cards" that named and graphically depicted a variety of animal body parts that had been cut up, butchered for human consumption? Or if, in another lesson, your child was encouraged to disregard what you have taught them about cruelty and violence, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?
Imagine you are a vegetarian or anyone who is committed to reducing violence and cruelty in the world. What are your rights as a parent to protect your child from the indoctrination of a public school education that teaches about the nutritional value of meat and the social value of farming animals for slaughter?
I'm guessing that most people, vegetarian and omnivore alike, would say that information about nutrition is important to children's health. And that vegetarians (and pacifists) can still raise their own, even (or perhaps especially) if they learn the facts about meat.
But this is ostensibly the same idea being trashed by Robert George and Melissa Moschella in their New York Times op-ed "Does Sex Ed Undermine Parental Rights?". The paragraph above is copied precisely from the first paragraph of their article, except where they talk about "a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts" I talk about the kinds of illustrations children are routinely shown to teach them about healthy eating.
The switch is a pedagogical tool that I use daily as a sex educator. It's necessary when teaching about sexuality, a topic whose construction is so rigid and reactionary in our society as to make the excessively conservative and controlling laws, social norms and expectations invisible to most of us. As a result most of us (including, it would seem, Robert George and Melissa Moschella) come to think and talk about sexuality (arguably the most complex and interdependent experiences in human phenomenology) as if we all obviously share a common language and common values with very little up for reasonable debate. One can almost feel the nudges and see the winks on the page as George and Moschella presume that surely we must all agree on the (excessively conservative) obvious when it comes to sex, especially when children are involved.
To illuminate the invisible hand at work in such assumptions, assumptions that would never fly, with say, eating meat, sex educators try to point out the ways that sexuality is artificially compartmentalized and isolated from its context in human experience in order for such control and silencing to be effective.
Consider the arguments made by George and Moschella.
They suggest that teaching about sexual behaviors is a form of indoctrination, and a tacit acknowledgement that engaging in these behaviors is okay. The crux of this argument suggests that talking about something makes it okay. But we teach our children about slavery in public schools, and it isn't something Americans condone.
They make the ultimate gesture of erasure by presuming that all parents would be horrified by the idea of their children knowing the names of adult sexual activities including, mutual masturbation. Not only, they simply, does talking about it amount to recommending it, they argue that acknowledging the very existence of mutual masturbation belongs a particular sexual ideology. They don't say it, but of course they mean a liberal ideology.
But as educators themselves, surely they know that the adoption of sexual behaviors does not align with religious, ideological, or party affiliation. In fact what little survey data we have on the subject suggests that some activities (like watching pornography online) are more popular in the so-called red states, and others (like using vibrators) are more popular among observant Christians.
The comparison I began with, of eating meat, is a personal one. I'm a vegetarian for reasons tied to reducing pain and suffering on the planet. But it's also an apt one as an educator. I don't think as a parent I have the right to block my child's access to basic knowledge about food, including meat.
Schools can and should teach about the nutritional value of meat. That's what schools do.
At home I can and should teach about the ethical and moral weight of eating meat. That's what parents do.
These two systems may clash often, but they aren't antithetical and in fact the points of conflict are what will make our children stronger.
The same is true for sex.
Follow Cory Silverberg on Twitter: www.twitter.com/aboutsexuality
Shereece Marcantonio: Why I Want to Make Peer-To-Peer Sex Education Happen
Janet Weinberg: Who's Minding the Kids?!
John Blase: Brennan Manning: All Is Grace: God Loves You As You Are
My expectation is: egg +sperm = baby. And you can include a side order of STD knowledge to help keep him alive.
But what’s all this business about hand jobs, doggie style, 69’s, cowboy rides, and the like. I don’t need you to teach that stuff. You done gone off the deep end there, mister.
Imagine a different scenario, which may bring home the point that parents can reasonably judge "value neutral" sex ed to be a profound, and potentially harmful, distortion of the truth. Imagine that a school teaches about cheating in the following terms: cheating is risky because you might get caught; there are various types of cheating behavior (described in detail) with different degrees of risk; low-risk cheating behaviors are better than high-risk ones; and the only other reason why you might want to avoid cheating is that if it happens to contradict your values, you may suffer feelings of guilt if you do it. If I were a parent, I would not want my children, especially at the impressionable age of 11 or 12, to be exposed to such distortions of the moral truth, and I think that I would have the right to prevent such exposure.
The comparison of teaching about slavery and sex makes no sense. Slavery is taught as wrong and degrading and no one should do it or be subject to it. Sex is not taught like that. It's taught as something that can be done if they choose, as long as it's done "safely", which is a lie--there is no such thing as "safe sex" for minors, either physically or emotionally.
Parents should also teach about the moral and ethical weight of having sex. The consequences of having sex or making decisions about sexual orientation at such a young age are heavy ones that could affect their whole lives. Parents--and other adults--should be the ones to tell children they don't have to bear that burden or responsibility at such a young age; they should be engaged with other things in life. There is plenty of time to make decisions about sex later when they are better prepared to deal with all the possible results.
The statistics are what they are because adults have abdicated their responsibilities in guiding children in the right direction--and that includes what is available to see and hear in the media, movies, TV shows, online, songs, and video games, which parents should be monitoring. Sexual indiscretion hurts people of any age, and adults should know better than to encourage it in minors, whether tacitly or overtly.
No good, and plenty of problems, come of promiscuity by males and females. This isn't about hell or judgment, it's about common sense and making choices that won't hurt themselves or others--and especially innocent babies they could have long before they are ready to be parents. If you've read about statistics of teenage parents, then you know their children are more likely to have medical problems, live in poverty, and end up being teenage parents themselves to perpetuate the cycle.
But to the subject of the article, yes, I think sex ed does undermine parents' rights--and their responsibility as well. Biology is fine to teach in school. It is not fine to teach about birth control or sexual practices or the politics of rights of people with sexual preferences. It is not fine for school staff to decide what is and isn't moral behavior for the children of others. I don't think they are trying to indoctrinate children, but I do think they are doing them grave harm by suggesting that children (minors) should be making decisions about sex when they obviously are not ready for it.
If schools teach about sex at all, it should be how easy it is to get pregnant and get STDs, WITHOUT the condoms on banana demonstrations. Hormones from animals are causing early puberty, but the "no sex" message is the most responsible one adults can give.
When my children were about to be teenagers, I started offering to babysit for any babies or young children from church or in the neighborhood for free to give parents time together. A lot of people took me up on it. My children saw how much work it was to take care of babies and toddlers, and that was the best birth control I could have provided for them. It backed up the strong and unequivocal "don't have sex" message from us and it worked.