The push for "comprehensive sex education" has always made me tilt my head to the side in interest and concern. As a product of parochial schools from K-12, the concern to learn how to put a condom on properly or to know the "options" of how to delay pregnancy when a female is in her early teenage years has truck as immensely odd and disturbing. People will say it's a health concern. I say it's a campaign disguised as concern to infiltrate the homes of parents without being the student's parents. It's an insidious plan. It's the invisible social worker influencing the very intimate actions of a child. It's government saying they're just merely concerned.
One reason I think sex education, at least how public schools handle it in general, is one big joke is that the act of sex isn't rocket science. Boys are naturally curious. Girls are naturally curious. Growing up, for whatever reason, no one that I knew of in either my grade, the grade below me or the grade above me, got pregnant before the age of 20. I suppose we either had decent parenting or just had good self-control. I think both. I don't think we were anymore mature than our public school counterparts, just that we had been taught that sex is intimidate and "special." I mean, I'd bet that we instinctually knew this and we respected more so than others, especially in comparison to any teenage John Hughes characters.
The approach to public school sex education is also warped. It's mostly done out of a public health concern. It indirectly says that sex outside marriage is okay and that to avoid pregnancy and STDs you can use many options of artificial birth control (ABC). Physicians in the forms of OB-GYNS support this push for ABCs on young teenage girls. Why? Simply put: it reduces STDs and pregnancies. Fair enough. But they are oddly not concerned about the effects of ABCs on what is biologically natural in the form of ovulation and eggs and so forth. Public studies triumph over the decline of teenage pregnancies due to the advent and use of ABCs. No concern is followed up by how ABCs effect the view of sex, children and marriage. No OB-GYN that I know of has raised an eyebrow. It's an odd mix. an OB-GYN deals with something that is natural yet they don't care much about the effects of what they push onto their patients.
Another reason I think public sex education is a crock is that it's rather immature. Sex is seen as something you sorta snicker at and if you've listened to the OB-GYN, Masters in Public Health expert, and you're "taking control of your sexuality" you might get an IUD implanted in your uterus. You want to the O but not the child. People mock abstinence in that it doesn't work, citing the failure rate. Stupidly enough they don't cite the failure of alcoholics getting a sip of wine instead of abstaining from it. Proof that abstinence is 100% effective are those who dedicate themselves to religious life or those who choose not have sex in general, either out of religious or health concerns. No sex. No kids. No STDs. If people are going to tout the brilliance of ABCs in its effectiveness while laughing at abstinence then they should also laugh at the failure rate of not using ABCs and having sex. Hello pregnancy.
Self-education, in this case, is better than having some government program waltz into your classroom or gymnasium or library extolling the wonders of ABCs. Heck, anecdotally, most of my friends who never had a "comprehensive sex education" never had any real issues regarding sex. They dated, got married and had kids. Unless you're some weird pasty loser, religious or otherwise, with underdeveloped social skills a Chesil Beach isn't likely gonna happen.
Better yet, I think my own sex education which was regulated to an annual visit to an outside secular agency dedicated to relatively neutral sex education starting in six grade (though I'm not sure how much the agency has changed since then), was more dignified and respectful to sex in general. Aided with my school's religious themes, we walked away with a somewhat balanced view of sex minus the touting of ABCs. At the end of the day we realized that if you don't want to get pregnant the best way is to not have sex. We were reminded of common sense that isn't all too common today.
Public "comprehensive sex education" is an exercise pushed by your agenda driven Masters in Public Health Overlord of Wokedom. This Overlord doesn't trust that kids can indeed figure it out without the government's help.
