Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The harmful mistakes of sex education in school

Comment from Britain

Those who can, do, according to the old saying, and those who can't, teach. That has always seemed to me unfair. However, I have come to think that those who can't teach, teach sex education. Judged by its results - not a bad way of judging - sex education has been an utter failure. The increase in sex education here in recent years has coincided with an explosion of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease (STD) far worse than anywhere else in Europe. Since the government's teenage pregnancy strategy was introduced in 1999, the number of girls having abortions has soared. You might well be tempted to argue that sex education causes sexual delinquency.

Only two months ago the Health Protection Agency reported that a culture of promiscuity among the young had driven the rate of STDs to a record. Almost 400,000 people - half of them under 25 - were newly diagnosed, 6% more than in 2006.

When something fails, the usual procedure is to drop it and try something else. With sex education, the worse it gets, the more people cry out for more of it and earlier. Ministers are considering whether to make schools offer more sex education, offer it earlier and deny parents the right to withdraw their children from it.

Last week the Family Planning Association - now calling itself the fpa, having joined other charities in a mad rush to reduce themselves to a couple of lower-case letters - published a comic-style sex education booklet for six-year-olds to be marketed in primary schools for use in sex and relationships lessons. It has printed 50,000 copies of Let's Grow with Nisha and Joe, and tried it out in more than 50 primary schools; it hopes to encourage schools that have shied away from sex lessons to take them on with Nisha and Joe. Oh dear.

There's nothing wrong with the pamphlet itself. Admittedly it's more of a dreary workbook than a "fun" comic, but there's nothing that would startle a child or should upset even the most conservative of "family campaigners". The rudest thing is a drawing of two children, naked, with instructions to draw lines connecting interesting bits of their bodies with the appropriate words. This is all to promote discussion of sex and relationships when children are young enough not to feel self-conscious.

It seems to me highly unrealistic (given that 25% of children leave primary school struggling to read and write) to assume that many six-year-olds could begin to read the labels "testicles" or "vagina". And it is infuriating, given that medical-style euphemism has triumphed over plain English, that the authors have chosen one that's wrong. "Vagina" does not mean the external genital organs, commonly referred to as "front bottom". It comes from the Latin for sheath or scabbard and means what that suggests. The correct word would be "vulva", but the ill-educated educationists blithely impose inaccuracy on our tiny children. However, that is not what I most object to.

What I object to about the book is what I object to about sex education as a whole (quite apart from its failures). Sex education - particularly compulsory and standardised sex education - is based on mistaken assumptions. The first is the pervasive assumption of equality - that is, that all six-year-olds or all 11-year-olds or 15-year-olds can discuss the complexities of sex in the same form in the same way. That's nonsense. Children vary in intelligence and progress. Some young children can easily decipher words such as "urethra"; others may never be able to read them.

More importantly, children and teenagers mature at different ages and come from different backgrounds with different family expectations. You cannot talk the same way to a shy 13-year-old who hasn't had her first period to another who is well acquainted with the darker recesses of the school bike shed. Some boys are men at 11 and 12, physically; others are children until much later. Some children's parents find it acceptable that their sons and daughters are having sex at 13, while others would be shocked: you cannot talk to all these children together. It would puzzle and offend them and might do them serious damage. And it undermines the authority of those parents who do not share the values of the teacher, or of the majority of the other pupils. It is wrong to assume that people want equality in such matters. They want differences.

Children and families and moral values are not equal, neither within schools nor outside them. They simply aren't the same.A sensitive teacher will try to make allowances, but there is a shortage in this country of good and sensitive teachers - hence the crisis in education.

Another mistaken assumption is that sex education ought, necessarily, to be entrusted to teachers, given how wildly they vary in ability and in moral attitudes. The thought that the government is considering making sex and relationship education compulsory in schools is terrifying. I can hardly imagine anything worse than subjecting a sensitive child to guidance on such matters from an inexperienced and politically correct teacher, who is neither well informed nor self-critical.

The relationships between sex, love, babies, crime and disease are too explosive to be left primarily to such a person, or to any person apart from the parents. Of course where parents can't, or won't, guide their children on such matters, the duty falls on teachers. Some may do a good job, although the evidence isn't encouraging. But none should take it on without parental consent.

It always amazes me when people complain that people don't talk about sex and there's not enough information about it. The truth is, you can hardly avoid it. Newspapers, magazines, chat shows, blogs, internet information sites, doctors' surgeries and all the rest are groaning under the weight of information about sex, contraception and relationships. Some of it I think is good; some of it you might think is better. And that's the point. Schools shouldn't be required to impose sex education, still less a standard sex curriculum on us. We should be able to pick and choose for our children among the infinity of information out there.

Channel 4's The Sex Education Show, for instance, strikes me as informative and helpful but depressingly vulgar. Others might find it tastefully frank. It's up to us to choose. Teacher, leave that child alone.

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In Praise of Educational Pluralism

I often hear it said that if the government did not determine what our children are taught, we would have no way to assure they learned the right things. The idea here is that every child deserves a proper education and that, although government education has its share of problems, at least we can keep an eye on who is being allowed to teach and what they are teaching. The free market, on the other hand, would supposedly allow us no such control; schools could simply teach whatever they wanted, and our children might grow up thinking that up is down, black is white, and right is wrong.

While this argument comes from the best of intentions, it is completely misguided for two basic reasons. The first, which has been widely discussed elsewhere, is that it gives an unreasonably pessimistic view of how a free-market education system would look. In a free market, competition would force producers to cater to their customers or risk losing business to other firms. This should lead us to expect that when customers are free to choose, producers will end up creating better products, not worse.

And in fact we can see this happening in the real world. For example, the success of graduates from particular universities reflects on the quality of the education there, with the consequence that universities are constantly trying to better themselves and their current students in order to compete for the best students in the future. The same seems to be true of private and preparatory schools at the high-school level and below. Although the government funds a number of these schools, universities and private schools are generally permitted to make their own decisions about what they will teach and who will be doing the teaching. And yet we do not see these institutions systematically teaching their students poorly or indoctrinating them with false ideologies. On the contrary, it seems fair to say that these more laissez-faire systems generally perform far better than our centralized public-school system.

But there is another reason to question the idea that governments must be involved to ensure that our children receive a proper education. That reason is that there is no such thing as a proper education. Different people have different conceptions about what kind of lives they want to lead, what kind of knowledge is important, and how they want their children to be raised. These differences do not represent one group's being right and the other's being wrong. Rather, a free society will always be characterized by reasonable pluralism in values and worldviews. But if this is the case, then it seems the idea that we should all get together under one roof and democratically decide how to educate our children is a bad one. Instead, it's sensible to welcome a number of different approaches to education, with the crucial decisions about how children are to be educated ultimately being left to their parents. As philosopher David Schmidtz writes in Elements of Justice:

In effect, there are two ways to agree: We agree on what is correct, or on who has jurisdiction -- who gets to decide. Freedom of religion took the latter form; we learned to be liberals in matters of religion, reaching consensus not on what to believe but on who gets to decide. So too with freedom of speech. Isn't it odd that our greatest successes in learning to live together stem not from agreeing on what is correct but from agreeing to let people decide for themselves?

For far too long we have ignored the possibility that in a society which embraces freedom of belief, religion, and expression, it is best to respect people's freedom to decide for themselves how they want their children educated. I understand that some may feel shocked by the suggestion that they do not know what is best for everyone else's children. But for the rest of us, it is clear that the only fair and equitable solution to the differences in our values and worldviews is to reject the flawed model of centralized government education and to put the power to choose back in the hands of parents.

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Far-Leftist sympathy for terrorists being preached to future Australian army officers

A RETIRED Australian general has dismissed as "unmitigated rubbish" a defence force course which teaches soldiers that terrorists are "victims". A Bali bombing victim has also expressed dismay at the Australian Defence Force Academy's terror studies degree. Maj-Gen Jim Molan, who in 2004 was Chief of Operations of Coalition forces in Iraq, has hit out at the lecturers who run the security and terror course.

Prof Anthony Burke, senior lecturer at the University of NSW where ADFA classes are held, in his book Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, said students should try to understand terrorists rather than fight them. "In the wake of 9/11, our critical task is not to help power seek out and destroy the 'enemies of freedom' but to question how they were constructed AS enemies of freedom . . . It is to wonder if we, the free, might already be enemies of freedom in the very process of imagining and defending it," he wrote. In another book, Fear of Security, Australia's Invasion Anxiety, Prof Burke said we should "abandon selfish visions of security, sovereignty and national interest".

Maj-Gen Molan said Prof Burke was "naive in the extreme". In 2004, he commanded major battles in Iraq during one of the most turbulent periods of the war. He said the experience taught him that Australia needed to heighten security, not go softly-softly with terrorists, but the ADFA degree seemed to be teaching surrender to a ruthless enemy. "It is like saying Churchill could have avoided World War II by surrendering to the Germans," he said.

He also rejected the idea that terrorists were victims. "Even if some of these people have had it tough, they are still making the choice to strap a bomb to their body, go to a location packed with innocent civilians and detonate," he said. "I didn't see any morality (in Iraq). These Islamic extremists are prepared to use extraordinary levels of violence. "If this is the view of ADFA staff then it is naive in the extreme."

Bali bombing victim Dale Atkins said he was shocked and upset that academics were excusing those terrorists who bombed the Sari nightclub killing 200 people. "Maybe this wouldn't have happened if we didn't go to war, but it's wrong to say it's our fault. We didn't deserve to go through such pain," he said.

Maj-Gen Molan, author of Running the War in Iraq, advocates a tightening in security and is shocked that ADFA is proposing the opposite. And Dr Mervyn Bendle, senior history lecturer at James Cook University, said the ADFA's course was being mimicked at other universities. "They are avoiding using terms like Muslim, Islam or Jihad as if we have to ignore the obvious religious connection that has been confirmed by the terrorists themselves," he said.

The Department of Defence said it encouraged "robust debate among ADF personnel at all levels". [I wonder if "robust debate" about the level of African immigration into Australia would also be permitted? I suspect that debate on that topic would be too robust altogether!]

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