Why is sex education so controversial?
Sex education is one of the most controversial topics in American public and private education. Some parents consider it vulgar and don’t want their kids learning such material in school. Others oppose it for religious reasons. And yet others consider sex education part of the liberal agenda to take over American schools and the hearts and minds of our kids.
But what does the data tell us about the efficacy of teaching sex education in high school ? What are common arguments in favor of and against it? What are some myths and, crucially, what are the most controversial aspects of this debate?
What follows is a list of a few popular arguments in favor of and against sex education. While this list is comprehensive, I’m sure I missed something so please let me know in the comments section about what I may have missed.
In favor: Your kids will learn about sex no matter what you do, so they might as well learn it in school
The majority of high school kids (and adults) these days have supercomputers the size of their hand in their pockets. Yes, I’m talking about smartphones. Not only does the average teenager have a smartphone, but (s)he also has almost unlimited access to knowledge on the Internet; the good, the bad, and the very ugly. According to some estimates, 80 percent of teens have already seen porn, although estimates of this figure vary.
I feel bad for parents here. They’re already overwhelmed with work, maintaining a household, keeping their kids safe, teaching them to be good human beings, and making sure they do well in school. It’s impossible for parents to do all these things and monitor every webpage they visit on the Internet, even with the strictest Parental Controls settings.
Given that teenagers have access to the Internet at almost every second of the day, it’s impossible to prevent them from learning about sex, whether it’s outright pornography or an article in the Cosmopolitan or Men’s Health magazine about sex toys and how to have incredible sex with your partner. And kids are smart these days; they know about VPNs and similar tools that they can use to hide their activity on the Internet.
So given that it’s basically inevitable that your kids will learn about sex sooner rather than later, would it not be better for them to learn about it from the qualified, professional teachers that you entrust with your children every day?
“Most young people have access to the internet. So if we are not providing them instruction that is medically accurate and age-appropriate, we are leaving it to chance for them to find something on the internet, i.e., porn, and then they think that’s what sex and sexuality is.”
— Michelle Slaybaugh, director of social impact and strategic communications at SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change
Against: Teaching kids about sex is vulgar.
For a lot of people, talking about sex is taboo. This is odd because without sex, the human race would cease to exist (assuming that we can’t keep all of humanity going with IVF).
Nevertheless, many people oppose sex education because they think kids shouldn’t be exposed to sex at such a young age. I have multiple thoughts on this.
First, I think the crux of this argument is that people are concerned about how age-appropriate the content is. That’s a fair point and should be considered when making/choosing the curriculum. You probably don’t want a 7-year old learning about syphilis.
Second, as I mentioned earlier, most kids have access to the Internet at a young age, so they can find out about sex within 0.57 seconds (which is how fast Google just gave me results to a random query). They’re on social media, they talk to their peers, they watch movies/shows on streaming services; like I said, it’s effectively impossible to prevent them from being exposed to sex in some form or the other.
Lastly, and most importantly, I think this argument shows that people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what sex education may or may not be.
Is it vulgar to teach kids about puberty and human anatomy? Should we tell the roughly 1 million women whose pregnancies end in a miscarriage or stillbirth that learning about miscarriages, stillbirths, or other complications during pregnancy is vulgar? Should we tell the millions of men and women who have been raped or suffered from other forms of sexual violence that it’s too vulgar to learn about consent and how to detect the signs of a potentially violent partner?
Should we tell the women who have had health problems as a result of hormonal birth control and are, consequently, twice as likely to have attempted suicide that their health issues are too vulgar to learn about?
Sex education isn’t about telling kids to go wild and have sex with every person in their class. Done well, it’s about helping them make healthy sexual choices as they grow up and become (young) adults.
In favor: Sex education results in healthier outcomes for kids
Eva Goldfarb and Lisa Lieberman studied 30 years of research on the efficacy of sex education and found “strong support for comprehensive sex education” and that there’s “evidence for the effectiveness of approaches that address a broad definition of sexual health and take positive, affirming, inclusive approaches to human sexuality. Findings strengthen justification for the widespread adoption of the National Sex Education Standards.”
Crucially, and in contrast to abstinence-only education, which has been shown to have no effect on teen birth- and abortion rates, sex education reduces “the rates of sexual activity, sexual risk behaviors (eg, number of partners and unprotected intercourse), sexually transmitted infections, and adolescent pregnancy.”
Against: It is parents’ responsibility to teach their kids about sex
This is a moral argument and moral arguments, by definition, have no right or wrong answer. So while I’m not morally or philosophically opposed to this argument, I think that, in practice, its consequences are problematic.
As we all know, knowledge is often passed down through generations. Taking the example of sex, your parents taught you certain things about it that you then teach your kids, who will teach it to their kids and so on.
But what happens if your parents taught you things about sex that are objectively, medically, and scientifically false? This false knowledge gets spread down generations and generations. For example, a recent survey found that 60% of American parents were raised thinking sex was “taboo”.
So following this logic, that means that they’ll teach their kids that it’s taboo, who will teach their kids that it’s taboo, and, well, you get the point. To take a less controversial example, I see the same thing happen with financial literacy and money habits: parents teach their kids bad money habits, which passes down through generations. This is why so many states have (finally!) passed laws mandating financial literacy in high school.
Lastly, I would have no problem with this argument itself if it was actually the case that parents taught their kids about sex. It’s fine if it’s their responsibility to do so, but do they actually execute their responsibility? The research on this is mixed: this article claims that only 58% of parents have spoken to their kids about sex, while this research finds that 82% of parents have done so, but that it’s not always about tougher, complicated topics with sex.
Furthermore, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (with the very user-unfriendly acronym of SIECUS) found that over 90% of likely voters (both Democrats AND Republicans) support some form of sex education in high school. A 2017 study by Kantor and Levitz supports this finding.
Against: Opposition to sex education for religious reasons
Religious parents oppose sex education because their religion forbids premarital sex. While I respect this belief, this argument makes an incorrect assumption (which I’ll address more in the next section). Namely, that teaching kids sex education causes them to have (premarital) sex. There is no evidence that proves this causal relationship. Moreover, it incorrectly assumes that sex education tells kids to have sex, which seems like quite a stretch to assume that.
That said, there is one part of this argument that proponents of sex education have to recognize is (at least somewhat) valid. Specifically, we live in such a polarized society that if proponents of sex education have their way, there is a (perhaps justified) fear that they will choose a sex education curriculum that goes beyond teaching the science of sex and will discuss the political, moral, and social aspects of it. For example, I can understand why parents are uncomfortable with their kids learning about different sexual positions, sex toys, or how to have “amazing” sex with your partner.
This points to what will likely be the biggest point of contention regarding sex education: the curriculum. Opponents want the curriculum to be 100% transparent and nothing done behind closed doors (pun intended?). Another very heated and politically-charged issue is whether sex education should include instruction about gender orientation, abortions, and other contraception.
I don’t really know how to handle this. In principle, I think the key is to stick to evidence-based, age-appropriate, and medically accurate content. But then again, given how polarized society is today, I can easily see people object to teaching kids anything about abortion, even though it is simply a part of women’s reproductive health (I know, I just lost all anti-abortion readers. Oh well.) or about gender orientation, even though there’s research that objectively discusses this.
Myth: sex education will cause kids to have more sex and start having sex earlier in life.
This argument is a complete myth that has no research whatsoever to support it. As stated earlier, the research strongly suggests that sex education results in fewer teenage pregnancies, less underage sex, and fewer instances of sexually transmitted diseases.
But there’s an assumption that is the foundation of this argument that I would like to address. Specifically, the people that believe this myth assume that it is the knowledge of sex that is harmful and will cause kids to have more (unsafe) sex and become teen parents.
Here’s why this logic doesn’t make sense. After the mathematics prodigy Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, killed all those people with his horrific bombs, nobody said that we should stop teaching kids mathematics or chemistry in school out of fear that somebody might use that knowledge to become the next Unabomber.
Nobody says that we should stop teaching kids about World War 2 in case someone reads about Hitler’s atrocities and says “you know what, he’s not too bad, I should try the same thing.” And nobody claims that we should stop teaching kids biology in order to avoid a situation where someone uses that knowledge to create some horrible type of biological warfare. And I could go on and on.
Since there’s no logic or evidence to support this myth, the only reason that I can think of that it still exists is purely due to emotion. It’s an argument that targets parents’ deepest fears.
And I don’t blame parents, honestly. Your kids are the most precious, beautiful creations in your life. You would do anything to protect them, both physically and mentally. But it’s intellectually dishonest for people to perpetuate this myth, which is why I felt a strong need to not only discuss it, but strongly rebuke it.
Summary of Sex Education State Law
SIECUS created a very comprehensive document that lists the sex education laws in each state in the U.S. in 2022. The interesting thing is that while many states mandate sex education, very few require it to be comprehensive, medically-accurate, taught by a teacher who is specifically trained in the subject, and so on.
Get involved with The Math Reform Initiative
If you agree that comprehensive, evidence-based sex education should be a mandatory course in high school, then you should support the Math Reform Initiative. You can do this by writing your Senators, House Representatives, and Ohio Board of Education President to let them know about what you think. Check out this link to find templates and more information for this. You can also check out the other articles I’ve written about the Math Reform Initiative at this link.
I’m the author of the books “You Say Soccer, I Say Football” and “Community Heroes: What a year as an AmeriCorps VISTA member taught me about community development”
