Sex Education Mistakes

An excerpt from a Minette Marrin column at TimesOnLine.co.uk:

Judged by its results -- not a bad way of judging -- sex education has been an utter failure. The increase in sex education here in recent years has coincided with an explosion of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease (STD) far worse than anywhere else in Europe. Since the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy was introduced in 1999, the number of girls having abortions has soared. You might well be tempted to argue that sex education causes sexual delinquency.

Only two months ago the Health Protection Agency reported that a culture of promiscuity among the young had driven the rate of STDs to a record. Almost 400,000 people -- half of them under 25 -- were newly diagnosed, 6% more than in 2006.

When something fails, the usual procedure is to drop it and try something else. With sex education, the worse it gets, the more people cry out for more of it and earlier. Ministers are considering whether to make schools offer more sex education, offer it earlier and deny parents the right to withdraw their children from it.

Primary complaints are that sex education teachers are often inexperienced, albeit politically correct, and the sex education curricula is based on incorrect assumptions that all children come from similar backgrounds and they mature at the same rate.

Common sense would customarily dictate that policies which create undesirable conditions should be abandoned as opposed to fortified. Arguably, the Brits are not using common sense regarding sex education.