School is meant to prepare students for the real world. The youth is taught how to exist and thrive outside of the classroom. While the system is effective, it isn’t perfect. Even students from a great and privileged school, like Olathe South, still aren’t prepared for life and suffer screw ups. Life is full of things that are considered taboo in school and, as students, it’s expected that you figure out everything on your own. There is no adult other than your parents to help you. Depending on that dynamic, there might not even be parents to help you. 

40 years ago this was a different problem. For example, the acceptance of promiscuous sex was finally coming to a climax (no pun intended) in the 70’s. This was great as far as the celebration of freedom of choice but there were no programs for the younger generation growing up in this era. The rate of teen pregnancy was asstounding back then and it could be traced back to the schools sexual education programs at the time. While it’s a great step forward in the progression of our culture, the schools have yet to follow suit. Abstinence-only education was the only thing kids were taught about sex. Kids would apply what they were taught and life went on because that was their only exposure to sex at that age. That all changed with the invention of the internet.

Googling things like the pythagorean theorem isn’t dangerous but young people googling sex can have some troubling results. It’s common now for young people to turn to the internet when they don’t know or understand something. 40 million people watch pornography in the United States alone. That’s almost the entire population of California. According to Bitdefender, children under 10 years old account for 22% of under-age porn consumption. Children are being exposed to the human body in a very misleading way. Most porn is not real sex. Some might be upset by this knowledge. Those are the people that needed better sex ed in school. Students are incredibly un-educated when it comes to things like reproductive organs. Men, especially, aren’t taught about the female anatomy and even some women don’t know about all of their genitalia, how it functions, or what some of the purposes are. We are only taught that “penis and vagina make babies after marriage and if you make a baby before marriage, then you die from HIV.” That was insanely exaggerated but the point is that schools aren’t making any effort to truly educate kids about sex. Leading them to watch porn, or ask their friends, who also have no idea what they’re doing. 

The school system has failed the youth by promoting stigma, suppressing sexual liberty, and withholding the resources to educate students about sex. Sexual topics are important because it’s innevitable that teens will have sex. The current sex education does nothing for kids other than make them feel confusion and, in some cases shame. Teaching about consent, anatomy, and even porn could be so beneficial for our society and could be the answer to a lot of problems with teens. School is the place to make this change. We can’t rely on parents to teach it because most of them haven’t been taught it either. It’s the schools job to develop a curriculum that benefits students when it comes to sexual education. Personally, I’d rather have my kids being taught about intercourse at school than on PornHub. Mr. Smith beats SpongeBob Squarenuts any day. 

There are great resources in the link below.

Stories