By: Maryjo M. Oster
When we at PCPTP talk to educators about the need for longer term, comprehensive, medically accurate, and evidence based sex education programming in our schools, overwhelmingly teachers, administrators, nurses, and a variety of other school personnel echo our sentiments and are in complete agreement with us on this fact. However, what we hear in response as the biggest obstacle to good comprehensive sex ed is not controversy, as you might initially think, but rather time and resources. According to most educators, schools simply do not view Health and its accompanying subtopics to be a very high priority, particularly in the face of the immense demands placed on the schools by the No Child Left Behind Act, which makes me wonder:
Should schools make health more of a priority by any number of means, such as increasing the number of Health credits required for graduation, providing more professional development opportunities for Health teachers, holding students accountable for their performance in Health classes as they are in Math and English courses, etc. Or, are schools so busy trying to be everything to everyone that they end up sacrificing quality in all areas as a result?
The school as social panacea idea is by no means a new one. Since the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century, Americans have believed that schools were capable of curing any number of social ails. Beyond providing instruction in the traditional curriculum areas (e.g., mathematics, English, the sciences), schools provide our students with one, sometimes two, meals, medical treatment when necessary, opportunities for physical activity, and instruction on being good consumers, nutrition, and a variety of other aspects of overall health and well being. Do schools take on too much?
With budget crunches and constant anxieties around test scores, health is little more than an afterthought for most American public schools. On the one hand, perhaps it may be time to get back to basics and return to the core academic subjects upon which modern schooling is based, the 3 Rs as they are referred to (reading, writing, and arithmetic). In the process of trying to provide comprehensive health education, physical education, consumer science, media literacy, home economics, and the various other non-academic subject areas that schools have adopted, it is entirely possible that we are diverting resources and focus away from the core subjects and sacrificing quality in all subjects as a result. However, if, hypothetically, schools were to return to focusing solely on the core academic disciplines and eliminate all other endeavors in the process, would other institutions arise to take them on in the school’s stead? Is there any other venue by which young people would be exposed to accurate information about the dangers of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, about how to avoid getting a sexually transmitted infection, about proper eating habits, about how to relieve stress and anxiety in a healthful way, and so on?
I contend that there is not. If schools do not provide this information to young people, they will likely not be getting it. Parents certainly convey some, if not most, of this information to their children, but consider that approximately 30% of all Americans are obese. Clearly the dietary and exercise habits that these individuals model for their children are not the ones the children should be getting. In the arena of teen pregnancy prevention, the data indicate that the daughters of teen mothers are far more likely to become teen mothers themselves. Again, as well intentioned as most American parents are, they are not professional educators and often young people are under-informed and/or misinformed.
