A truce in the sex ed wars?

Right now, both sides of the sex education debate still insist that education can change sexual activity. As best as we can tell, they're both wrong.

By Jonathan Zimmerman

from the July 30, 2007 edition

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New York - Hey, check it out: Abstinence education doesn't work!

It's fun to be right, that's for sure. So my fellow liberals have been gloating since last April, when an exhaustive five-year study showed what we always suspected: Kids receiving "abstinence education" are no more likely to delay sexual intercourse than their peers.

Politicians are starting to notice, too. Although the federal government continues to finance abstinence education, 11 state health departments rejected it this year. Even more, three states are considering laws that would ban any sex education program that isn't supported by "science" or "research."

But here's what most liberals won't admit: We don't have solid evidence for our own favored forms of sex education, either. So if the law requires science-based sex ed, we might have to change our entire approach.

Sex education started about a century ago, when fears of venereal disease seized the American middle class. Newspapers carried lurid stories of well-to-do men who acquired VD from prostitutes, then infected their wives. So physicians and educators created curricula to warn children about these dangers and discourage any sex outside marriage.

That remained the central theme until the 1960s and 1970s, when liberal educators developed a new curriculum based on student choices rather than teacher directives. Known today as "comprehensive" sex education, this approach echoes the messages I give to my own daughters about the subject. Sex may be pleasurable but can be dangerous; so if you decide to have sex, minimize the dangers. That is, use protection.

The protection part became even more urgent in the age of HIV/AIDS. To liberals, of course, the AIDS crisis simply reinforced the need for clear information about contraception. But conservatives drew the opposite conclusion. To keep children safe from pregnancy and disease, we must transmit a firm and simple message: no sex before marriage.

And so abstinence-only education was born. Tucked into the welfare-reform bill of 1996, it got a big boost from the Republican-dominated Congress in 2001. And it still draws $176 million in federal money, even though – as we now know – it doesn't make children more likely to abstain from sex.

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