By Cal Thomas, Los Angeles Times Syndicate
November-December 1994 – For more than 30 years, those who favor a certain kind of sex education in public schools have told us that by giving younger and younger children information about how their sex organs work, and then handing them contraceptives and abortion information, society can reduce unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease.
Now, in a searing cover story in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead writes that the curriculum known as “comprehensive sex education,” mandated in 17 states, has failed children and society. It has neither reduced pregnancy nor slowed the spread of venereal diseases.
She explodes a number of myths about sex education. The biggest one is that simply by giving children information and removing their inhibitions, their behavior can be modified in a way that will produce “positive” results.
Whitehead’s model is New Jersey. In 1980, New Jersey adopted one of the nation’s first required comprehensive sex education courses, beginning in primary grades. The program enjoys widespread support among politicians and parents. It contains a number of assumptions that are common to most sex education curricula.
First, children are “sexual from birth.” Sex educators reject the notion of a latency period, or time of innocence. They want kids thinking about their sex organs as soon as possible.
Second, children are sexually miseducated, parents are incompetent to do the job, so “professionals” must do it for them. Discussions of morality are to be avoided because that only confuses the issue and brings in guilt factors that, they contend, cause so much sexual dysfunction.
The curriculum, known as Learning About Family Life, discusses divorce, HIV, masturbation – the usual litany – but has little about what used to be considered normal, such as marriage, self-control and virginity. The assumption is that everyone is either doing it, or will soon. And, in fact, doing it in whatever manner and with whomever is OK by the state.
So, New Jersey’s official sexual position is grounded in condoms, abortion and the advantages of “protected sex.” Abstinence gets short shrift because it is not based on “reality.” The closest the state gets to promoting abstinence is a discussion of noncoital sex, known as “sexual expression without risk.” Rutgers education professor William Firestone, who studied New Jersey’s sex education curriculum, says this approach offers “real opportunities to reduce dangers to many teens who engage in sexual behavior, despite recommendations for abstinence.” Whitehead writes that teaching teenagers to explore their sexuality through noncoital techniques has only “perverse effects,” since it is likely to lead to coitus and that it “comes close to educational malpractice.”
Since these comprehensive sex education courses were begun, sexual activity and its unwanted consequences have increased. In New Jersey in 1980, 67.6% of teenage births were to unmarried mothers. By 1991, the figure was 84%.
Whitehead writes, “It is hard for advocates to claim that the state with the nation’s fourth-largest percentage of unwed teenage births is a showcase for their approach. As is typically taught, sex education has little effect on teenagers’ decisions to engage in or postpone sex. Nor do knowledge-based sex education programs significantly reduce the incidence of teenage pregnancy.”
Whitehead concludes, “Formal sex education is most successful when it reinforces the behavior of abstinence among young adolescents who are practicing that behavior. Religiously observant teens are likelier than others to refrain from early sex, while the highest level of premarital intercourse occurs among teens with no religious affiliation.”
That would seem to offer an often neglected opportunity for churches and synagogues to begin or expand their instruction about sex within a moral framework that has shown considerable success in achieving the goals the state has failed to produce.
What makes us think that children, who are forbidden to drive in most states until they are 16, can handle sex at even earlier ages? The state ill serves the public by trying to put children in the sexual driver’s seat before they are ready – and with incorrect sign posts that have led them astray. 
