Sex ed. in schools debate

There’s always been the debate of whether sex ought to be taught in school or at home. It’s simple – teach it at school. School’s are expected to teach reading, writing, spelling, smelling nicely, brushing teeth, tying shoes, driving safely, good table manners, pet care, nutrition, exercise, rectal health, percentages, safe Internet use, safe television watching, so why not sex?

Reason One: There are no bike sheds at home. Reason Two: Parents tell their kids that they should have sex, eventually. Don’t they realise that that’s where kids come from? If we can just slam kids with the abstinence message we can stamp out HIV, herpes, warts, syphilis and all the other messy sexually transmitted disasters – such as babies which become children which then become teenagers.

No sex means no teenagers and no teenagers means many school issues resolved. Imagine – class sizes would plummet to manageable sizes. Truancy, glue-sniffing, marijuana-use, teenage drinking, boy-racing weekend burnouts, kids calling teachers nicknames and that insidious smell that schools reek of – all gone. There’d be enough text books to go around. Marking loads would plummet. Schools would have enough money. Teachers could be teachers again instead of cattle herders and air traffic controllers.

Sex ed. at school also means more teaching jobs.

A typical sex ed. lesson might go something like, ‘Right, be quiet and listen to this – it’s all you ever need to know about sex… ‘NO’. Copy that into your note books. Role play it. Mime it. Rap it. Write a poem that expresses how you feel about it. Discuss how people in other cultures and other times feel about it.’

Sex ed.’s easy to assess in an NCEA-appropriate way. For example, here’s a written test question… If another teenager suggests having sex, what is the correct answer? A: No. B: Not on your life. C: Never. D: Ooooh yuck, no way.

Another lesson might include a video of a birth. That’s surely got to discourage them – as long as they associate sex with the nine month later event. A Caesarean birth might be even better and if twins or even triplets appear from the murky depths, wow, that’s got to get the ‘no’ message across.

Of course, it’s not real learn­ing unless it involves IT – we all know that. So try looking at a few no-sex websites. www.veryuglynakedpeople.com is a good place to start. You might also like to explain that if the messy person-to-person sex really is as sexy as the advertising and movie and music people all make it out to be then Apple would’ve invented iSex and not an iPhone. (They’re only teenagers – they’ll believe it.)

— Peter Giddens