Sex ed in America
Monday August 28, 2006
Also over le weekend, I read this NYT Book Review essay evaluating a new history of school-based sex education since the 1960s. Reviewer Judith Shulevitz says that the message of Kristen Luker's book is: the research shows that it doesn't...
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Luker's approach, as you describe it, is the sanest approach to the debate I've ever seen. I hope "naturalist" and "sacralist" can replace the worn-out cliches we seem stuck on and with.
Thanks for bringing this here. I'll be back for more after I've viewed the source material.>
Kristen Luker is, in my opinion, among the most impressive female scholars of "women's issues" in the US academy.
I was assigned her book "Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood," three times for classes during my college years and she made a rather similar claim there -- that what most separated the attitudes of pro-life and pro-choice activists (and she noted that the former were mostly women) was how motherhood was constructed, the former seeing it as a calling, the latter as a choice. She understands very clearly how the language and descriptors we use always already frame how we see reality by defining our culture.
Luker took seriously her role as a scholar of politics and culture to let people speak in their own terms and (this was her self-report) the women on both sides thought she was one of them.>
That's fascinating, Victor -- motherhood as calling vs. motherhood as choice. It's an "essence vs. existence" argument deep down, isn't it?>
ROD:
This fits very well, of course, with those three questions that I use all the time when I cover doctrinal debates in Christian groups. They help me, to use James Davison Hunter terms, divide the orthodox from the progressives.
The questions are:
(1) Are the biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this event really happen?
(2) Is salvation found through Jesus Christ, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6).
(3) Is sex outside of the Sacrament of Marriage a sin?
And there's that issue again in question 3.>
"...the worldview I hold and advocate in "Crunchy Cons" is sacralist about most everything. And it is a metaphysical view because I truly believe it's the most true to human nature, and indeed to the structure of the universe."
This is is it in a nutshell, Rod. Great post.>
I respect Luker's work a great deal, because she gives us the language to understand our differences but also gives us the language to critique our understanding of differences. She doesn't place one approach as superior to the other, which allows us to have a more honest debate with ourselves and others.
As a liberal and a "naturalist," it helps me understand the sacralist approach but also understand why we have so much difficult reaching concensus. If you believe your values are sacralist, you aren't going to reject or rethink them regardless of what evidence is provided to point out the flaws. Abstinence education is the best, even though it is largely ineffective, because it is consistent with out idea of the divine and the sacred and no one can tell you how flawed it is.>
Luker makes a lot of sense. Adults will never agree about the subject of sex education. Ultimately, the subject should be left to the parents. I think that it would be best to take sex education out of schools and develop more privately held programs that parents attend with their teen. I've read that the incidence of teen pregnancy is lowest among teens who have open communication about sex with their parents.
There are good programs out there that are comprehensive.
http://www.teenpregnancy.org/
The incidence of teen pregnancy is dropping in the African-American community. They should continue doing what they're doing.
The incidence of teen pregnancy is lower in Canada and Europe. Maybe we could learn something from them.
Naturalist vs sacralist? I live my life as a sacralist, but I don't think that people are as bad as most sacralists make people out to be. Marriage doesn't necessarily make for mature sex. I know people who are married who use sex as reward/punishment. There are men who are abusive who use it to hurt their spouse. I could read the instructions from God in the Bible to come up with some pretty odd(& ancient) ideas about a woman's place in a marriage. I can't help thinking about Andrea Yates.>
I agree with Susan (and I'm a liberal sacralist!). My thoughts exactly. Thanks. Great post, Crunchy Con.>
If you believe your values are sacralist, you aren't going to reject or rethink them regardless of what evidence is provided to point out the flaws.
No.
What counts as (1) "evidence" and (2) "flaws" are determined by the values and worldviews in the first place. And that applies equally within both worldviews.
For example on (1); "Paul says fornicators will not inherit the Kingdom of God" is simply true. But to the "naturalist" it's not evidence of anything, other than Saul's own guilt-ridden sexphobia, and there's no evidence of a "Kingdom of God" anyway.
For example (2); "abortion/contraception have to be easily available, otherwise women cannot be as sexually free as men" is simply true. But to the "sacralist," it's not a flaw because sex equality is at best a conditional good, and sexual freedom is downright bad.>
I think the 'sacramentalist' / 'sacralist' thing is the best thing in "Crunchy Con" because non-believers can understand it. Catholicism used to be full of this marvellous apologetic tool, but somehow lost the ball.>
Victor, I have to say, for all we've been at each other's metaphorical throats, you make a heck of alot of sense in this combox. Thanks for sharing.>
This topic raises allot of interesting questions. The big one being, should we bother with sex education in public schools at all? If there is something as fundamental to how we see our existence such as Victor has touched on, then it seems that either type of curriculum is always going to be flawed. When you compound that with the data, hidden behind the NY Times firewall, which suggests that neither solution works as prescribed then there is a strong case for such a move.
The idea of a school system, anyway, is to insure that the next generation is educated in areas that cannot be taught at home. Things like mathematics, history, and science come to mind for instance. I would move to say that most, if not all parents should be able to impart their moral and practical take on sexuality to their children. After all they do have experience. Any takers?>
Remember the CDC study published February 14 (of all days), 2004? It found that students who had signed "True Love Waits" pledges as preteens were, by age 21, just as likely to have had sex than students who had not signed such cards, but slightly more likely to have STDs and slightly less likely to use birth control of some type. So you might quote a local phenomenon in one state to say that traditional sex education has failed, but nationally an abstinence only based sex education has demonstrably done more harm than good.>
I prefer to avoid using these statistics for anything but a jumping-off point. It is not valid to assert that one approach is better than another using these stats, there being neither a clear distinction nor a reliable causative connection applicable to the general case.
Sorry, that last phrase was rather out there, eh? It means that we should always exercise extreme caution in applying general case expectations to any group smaller than the general case group. These things are instructive, yes, important sign posts, but we must do further analysis to draw any conclusions about our local environs.
Anyway, that is my POV exactly on the political side of the question. Single-approach anal retentives (ahem) are the root cause of the consequences to our children, not the methods per se. I also like the idea of letting sex ed be a family-driven knowledge transfer, there being no good way to impose any kind of one-size-fits-all approach. If nothing else, we should take the lesson offered -- that single approaches are not what they are hyped to be -- and start working to create consensus and compromise.>
My point is only that anecdotal arguments about sex education (as the one used to close Rod Dreher's post) should be seen in the light of broader, national scope studies about the effectiveness of different types of sex education. I wouldn't suggest that we use a statistical study as the only basis for, I don't know, giving condoms to trick-or-treaters on Halloween. But asked by my Board of Education about prospective policies on sex ed based on an anecdote about a Clinton official and a reliable large-n study by the Centers for Disease Control, I'd pick the latter.>
"But /if/ asked by my Board of Education... I'd /prefer/ the latter."
Apologies for the typo.>
Daniel, I hope you didn't take my post as argumentative. Your points are well said, and well taken.>
Ah, yes. I remember sex ed in school. I can say, however, that if it can be taught with class, then ours was. It was the "Family Planning" part taught in Home Economics. There was some biology taught, there was a birth film to see (scared the jeepers outta me, I tell ya!), and there was something done which would have been shot out of the water today, I'm sure. A nurse was brought in to lecture and discuss birth control methods and their effectiveness and to warn against STDs. Then, ministers, priests, and rabbis were brought in to give their church's beliefs on family planning and premarital sex. The students' families were made aware of the upcoming event every year in case they opted to have their child not sit-in on it. No opted out to my recollection. No one was offended. The birth film scared me badly enough that it did set in stone for me that giving birth was not on my "to do" list for the future. I think the class overall was informative and served us well. Facts were taught and myths were dispelled. Sex happens, no matter what one's beliefs, and many of our parents were grateful that we were going to be taught correct information. We were in no way encouraged to be promiscuous by this course. If anything, it made us more likely to abstain for a few more years.>
No, I didn't take it as argumentative at all - at least, no more than I usually am. =) I just wanted to make sure that I'd been clear about my intentions in bringing up the other survey.>
Daniel, you misread my post. I assume that Luker's conclusion is correct, and that neither abstinence-only sex ed or conventional sex-ed have much success to show. I think peer pressure and family environment are far more determinative of a teenager's sexual decision-making than anything taught to them in class. I brought up the Nashville anecdote not to argue that conventional sex-ed doesn't work, but that it didn't work in this case (despite the Clinton Administration's baseless claim that it had), and to point out how unwilling its advocates were to admit the failure of their program. I would imagine that abstinence-only advocates wouldn't be all that different in this regard. The stakes seem so high for partisans on both sides because they're not just arguing about techniques, but for opposing views of human nature.>
>Franklin wrote: I also like the idea of letting sex ed be a family-driven knowledge transfer...
Pop: Junior?
Junior: Yes, Pop?
Pop: You're getting to be quite a young man now, and I'm sure you've been noticing many changes and new feelings; I think it's time we had that "family-driven knowledge transfer" your big brother and I once had...
I'm struck here as in other areas by the incommensurable frames of duelling reference not just across the loosely-arrayed "sides", but within them as well, in the choice made between (or combined in some cases) the ethical and the instrumental/utilitarian arguments. I think of parallels derived from wearied exposure to, e.g., the self-presentation among libertarians, and among private-firearms advocates. The ethical defenders of a society organized round, say, the maximum application of the market-voluntary principle and the limited state tend to rely upon natural-rights doctrine and often a neo-Thomist epistemology and ethics (both Rothbard and Rand acknowledge a debt to Aristotelian traditions), which, though more-or-less implicitly subscribing to the belief of socially beneficent *outcomes* issuing from their preferred *a priori* practice, find statistical, consequentialist studies irrelevant and misguided for purposes of "making the case" for maximal individual liberty, when justice inheres not in sociological end-states but in the respect shown toward the life and (justly-derived) property of the individual, rooted in a particular metaphysic of man's earthly life. The utilitarian case for liberty, by contrast, whose paladins include, say, the Cato Institute, REASON magazine and its former "Dynamist" editor Virginia Postrel, and, in spots, the editorialists at THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, tend to highlight, and fortify their case upon more readily such outcome-based phenomena resulting from liberty as technological innovation, rising incomes, and diversified consumer choice.
In the gun-control debate, one might frame two poles along the following rough lines: the rights-based approach as formulated most powerfully in the celebrated essay "A Nation of Cowards" by Jeff Snyder
http://www.vcdl.org/new/cowards.htm
(originally in THE PUBLIC INTEREST, Fall 1993), a pro-life/antiwar libertarian ethicist and attorney much indebted to Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Lysander Spooner, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Solzhenitsyn et al - and the influential MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME approach of John Lott, much indebted to the latest regression theorems of the statistical social scientist in highlighting, as the title of Lott's book indicates, the drop in violent crime in states whose legislators, after the mid-1980s, lowered legal obstacles in the way of the private ownership and concealed-carry permissibility of firearms. The Snyderites by contrast see rights as inherent and not malleable under statistical showmanship, and stress the cockeyed nature of using the abuse of a fundamental life-preserving liberty by a criminal minority as a pretext to strip it by law from others, and the character-deformed cowardliness of relegating - in spirit no less than in letter - the sole legitimate use of firearms to agents of the state, who become thereby a sanctified demigod class entitled to liberties denied the rest of us (and immune from prosecution, per precedent, should they fall derelict in their duty to protect their citizen charges), and the cowardly totalitarian implications of "safety by prevention"; Snyder also portrays a God-derived obligation to meet the perpetrators of mayhem upon one or one's loved ones right there, on the spot, with lethal force should that be required to preserve one's sacred life.
In the arena of sex education, given the centrifugal fragmentation of our latter-day "moral community" in the sphere of public "education", I suspect the hoped-for consensus or compromise in this line is, given the one-size-fits-all, all-or-nothing nature of pedagogical practice, a phantasy, and that's a good thing - since the way forward in every sphere lies in a maximizing of decentralism, secession and the burning off of rotten social structures and belief patterns, we can't bring the present system crashing to the ground fast enough, in telling the public schools what the famous Quaker said when confronted aboard ship by the pirate - "Friend, thee has no business here" - as he calmly and stoutly tossed him to the sharks.
Here are two stirring "sacralist" essays on how to Teach Your Children - and Yourself, too - Well the Facts of Life:
"In Praise of Free Love" by Sam Torode, originally from THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE in 2003 -
http://www.cruxmag.com/FreeLove.htm
"To most people today, fertility is a disaster waiting to happen. Getting pregnant is like contracting a disease thankfully, there s a pill to vaccinate against it. When accidents happen, men have it fairly easy. But it s no fun being a woman. What s desirable is to be free to be like a man, able to enjoy sex all the time without getting pregnant"...
And the essay from the regular department "Children...and Ourselves" in the July 5, 1950 number of the humanist-decentralist weekly MANAS, reaches, from the vantage of editors steeped in neo-Platonist/Socratic idealism, Indian philosophy, Gandhian/Thoreauvian/Tolstoyan self-transcendence and Theosophist discipline, insights which overlap with Christian/environmental sacralists:
http://manasjournal.org/pdf_library/VolumeIII_1950/III-27.pdf
"And not only does it [The *Kinsey Report*] fail to tell him anything important about the procreative instinct, and how its accompanying emotions may best be expressed it even forgets to mention procreation, except once, briefly, and in passing. The Kinsey Report focusses attention entirely upon the physically sexual, or sensual, proclivities of man, and leaves entirely out of account the most important thing of all, the relationship of romantic and procreative feelings to the responsibility for children.
We should ourselves put the whole matter very simply, to an adult as well as to an adolescent: maturity is a state at which we arrive by equalizing freedom and responsibility. Mature expression between the sexes cannot be achieved if entirely divorced from some sort of willingness to bring children into the world. If men and women, or boys and girls, completely divorce sex experience from the thought of potential parenthood, they are playing at something, rather than living it and will not find anything really worth their while. They may find, instead, a growing dissatisfaction with their relationships, for nature has a habit of refusing to be disparted. Whether we are talking about natural resources or the affairs of the sexes, it seems to be a fact that the person who takes, and shows no willingness to give, is robbed of much that he might otherwise achieve. The wastelands caused by human greed and immaturity are far from beautiful, and so are those relationships between the sexes existing entirely on independent desires to indulge biological whims"...>
Scott,
The Kinsey Report focusses attention entirely upon the physically sexual, or sensual, proclivities of man, and leaves entirely out of account the most important thing of all, the relationship of romantic and procreative feelings to the responsibility for children.
There is a good and valid reason for that focus. It's called the scientific method. Kinsey conducted a scientific survey, and while you can (and should) critique his methodology, you (general) have no room to critique his scope.
It's like taking my analysis of the weather, wherein I state my goal to be the marking of trends in the last 100 years, and complaining that I didn't give you tomorrow's forecast. Or, worse, claiming that I did give you tomorrow's forecast, and it turned out to be completely wrong.
Kinsey's work set the benchmarks, the points from which later work could make comparisons or refine the original analysis.>
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