Why comprehensive sex-ed isn't the answer
Here is Matt Abbott on why abstinence-only education is better for teens. It's a good read and he reminds us that President Bush has proposed spending $270 million on abstinence education in 2005. Congress only approved $168 million (still an increase) which brings abstinence funding to $900 million over five years. Cool!
posted by David at 9:46 AM
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2 Comments:
The comparison to "Just Say No" is thought-provoking, but I was pretty disappointed with the article. I'm not sure I would say "good read." It doesn't examine the problems with current abstinence-only education recently exposed, and it doesn't acknowledge the complexity of this issue, in my opinion.
I think we should definitely teach students the myriad benefits of abstinance, but students should also know the facts about sex, plain and simple, like I learned in sixth grade in my Catholic elementary school. We should teach abstinence, but there is no reason not to also provide accurate, comprehensive sex education (at least none that Matt Abbott points out).
On second thought, in my DARE classes, we were also taught accurate information about various classes of drugs, even as we were rightly told to say "No." (In fact, we were even allowed to draw the common sense conclusion that Marijuana is less addictive than cigarettes and less debilitating than alcohol, but that's another discussion...)
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