...Should Sex Education Be Taught In School? Kierra Cobb Dr. Gwendoline Ayuninjam EDU1301-02 November 24, 2014 Abstract Sex education is a big controversial issue today in society. The debate over sex education in the United States centers on the question of who should teach students about issues relating to sex such as intercourse, pregnancy, contraception, gender identity, sexual orientation, sexually transmitted diseases, and relationships. Should sex education be left up to parents, or do schools have a responsibility to inform students about these issues? There are many people who support the idea of sex education being taught in school, and there are others who do not agree. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey, more than 47 percent of all high school students say they have had sex; and 15 percent of high school students have had sex with four or more partners during their lifetime. It also states that among students’ who had sex in the three months prior to the survey, sixty-percent reported condom use and twenty-three percent reported birth control pills usage during their last sexual encounter (NCSL,2013). Sex Education provides positive feedback about sexuality and sexual expressions, including benefits of abstinence, the sexual reproductive system, and also relationships. There are several pros and cons towards teaching sex education in all school systems. Sex education is not predominantly about sex. Other issues originate...
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...have talked to their children about sexual education, leaving eighteen percent to figure it out on their own. Everyone has their own opinion on if sexual education should be taught in public schools and one may find it crazy that kids don't get a good education on sexual activity, and others find it crazy that kids learn that. If every state required a good sexual education no one could do anything about it and everyone would get the same education. Believe it or not there's much rivalry whether or not sexual education should taught since the 1960's. There has been much controversy about this for a long time, and groups against it affected a lot. How else would the children who's parents don't talk to them find out. In the 1970's 20 states voted to restrict or abolish sexual education being taught in schools. By the end of the decade only three states had required sexual education. (Kentucky, Maryland, and New Jersey) Classes for sexual education would teach a wide range of topics. Such...
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...about sex in the United States. The magority of sex education takes place in 6th-8th grade where they learn how to say no to sex, methods of birth control, STDs and how to prevent HIV/AIDs. Sex education helps reduce teen pregnancy and STDs but goes againts what some parents want to be taught. “Each year, U.S. teens experience as many as 850,000 pregnancies, and youth under age 25 experience about 9.1 million sexually transmitted infections (STIs)” (McKeon). As these numbers stick out to any ordinary person, schools still have not taken the initiative to teach sex education. Sex education can be explained in two different ways comprehensive or abstinence only. The difference of the two is that comprehensive sex...
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...Danielle McKenzie Ms. Thomas English Class MW (1:40) November 14, 2011 Should sex education be increased in schools in an attempt to curb problems such as teenage pregnancy and sexual transmitted diseases? The issue in the world today is that kids worldwide are getting pregnant or getting stds or maybe even both. Parents are asking what ways or programs that can prevent the kids from those problems. Teen pregnancy is happening throughout the United States. Seeing that sex education is not really taught at schools that makes most kids u aware of what they are doing sexually and the bad things that come with having sex such as being pregnant or catching a sexual transmitted disease or even catching Aids. Having sexual education being taught in schools will make the teen pregnancy and std and aids rate go down. Most teens who do not receive any type of sexual education are most likely to become pregnant or get a disease. Teen Pregnancy is a huge issue that affects many families in the United States. An average of one million teen girls in the United States gets pregnant. Majority of teen pregnancies are to low income or eve poor families. Most teen pregnancies are unplanned. Most teens that become pregnant do not get a college degree. It has been said that more than half of teen moms are going to have another child following their first one in less than a year. Most teens that get pregnant do not have an abortion because their parents are against abortion or their child...
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...Sex Education in Schools Anquavese Jones ENG/102 06/26/2011 Becky Wilfahrt Abstract Teenage sex education is a topic of much debate in America’s schools because sex and its health related issues are prevalent in the lives of so many adolescents. Teenagers’ engagement in sexual activities has led to an increase in sexually transmitted diseases, emotional and psychological injuries, and out-of-wedlock childbearing (Rector, 2002, para. 1). Therefore, schools across the nation have been charged with implementing programs that will educate the young about the risks of engaging in sexual activities before marriage. America’s schools use one of the two commonly known approaches in hopes to deter premarital sex. These approaches are abstinence education and comprehensive sex education. Abstinence education is a type of sex education that places strict emphasis on abstaining from sex until marriage. Comprehensive sex education examines abstinence along with sexual reproductive health education and contraceptives. This paper will examine both approaches and show that comprehensive sex education is the most effective method. Introduction Sex is a hot topic that reaches many children through the different mediums to include school, internet, radio, and television. An effective way to arm our children with important data concerning sex education is by providing abstinence education in our schools. According to Powezek, in the United States, maturation classes are usually implemented...
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...Who is Responsible for Sex Education? Writing 291 Joseph A. Marco 22 July 2010 Public schools systems have been implementing sexual education into their classrooms as a regular part of instruction for decades. Ongoing controversies exist when dealing with this issue whether sex education being taught in the public schools or whether it should be considered the responsibility of the parents. It seems most parents are either for or against it and very rarely are they standing on middle ground. Given the statistics does it matter who teaches the children of the United States the basics of sex education? Children should receive a basic unbiased and informative sex education in school, from their it should be the parents responsibility. By their 18th birthday, six in 10 teenage women and more than 5 in 10 teenage men have had sexual intercourse. Of the approximately 750,000 teen pregnancies that occur each year, 82 percent are unintended with more than one quarter ending abortion. The United States continues to have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the developed world – almost twice as high as England, Canada, and Wales and eight times as high as the Netherlands and Japan. In addition to the teen pregnancy rate, the teens in the United States contract roughly nine million new sexually transmitted infections (STI’s) each year. Though teens in the United States have levels of sexual activity similar to levels among their Canadian, English, French, and Swedish...
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...Research Paper November 13, 2011 Pros and Cons of Sex Education in Schools Sex education in public school has been a controversial issue in the United States for quite a while now. I feel like it really needs to be into schools with so many teen pregnancies, HIV and STD’s cases sex education is needed. Most of the American public believes that sex education should be taught at home by the children’s parents. They feel this way because the sex education programs in schools do not emphasize on abstinence instead they encourage the children to have sex instead. American culture is very sexually oriented. When you turn on your TV or listen to music sex is all you can hear. The pros of sex education in school are countless. Sex education in school gives the kids opportunities to express themselves with their sexuality. It also prevents them from becoming parents at an early age. Each year, U.S. teens experience as many as 850,000 pregnancies, and youth under age 25 experience about 9.1 million sexually transmitted infections (STIs). By age 18, 70 percent of U.S. females and 62 percent of U.S. males have initiated vaginal sex. When expressing comprehensive sex education is effective at assisting young people to make healthy decisions about sex and to obtain healthy sexual behaviors. No abstinence-only-until-marriage program has been shown to help teens delay the initiation of sex or to protect themselves when they do initiate sex. The U.S. government has spent over one billion...
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...Should Sex Education Be Taught in Schools Laterra Dykes, Nastasia Davis, David Webb, Joy Dobbins BCOM/275 May 29, 2014 Dewayne Acree Sexually active teens are a matter of severe concern in the United States and many other countries. In the past several years many school-based programs have been created for the sole purpose of delaying the beginning of sexual activity. There seems to be a growing compromise that schools can play an important role in providing youth with a knowledge base which may allow them to make knowledgeable decisions and help them shape a healthy lifestyle (St Leger, 1999). The school is the only institution in regular contact with a sizable percentage of the teenage population (Zabin and Hirsch, 1988), with virtually all youth attending it before they initiate sexual risk-taking behavior (Kirby and Coyle, 1997). The idea of sex education is a very controversial subject. Sex education will teach teens about the importance of safe sex. There are two different styles of learning about sex education, which are abstinence and sex education or comprehensive. Comprehensive education discuss abstinence as a choice. Even though, comprehensive sex education teaching abstinence as a choice it still inform the teens about contraception and how to avoid obtaining sexually transmitted diseases. Abstinence education teaches teens about abstinence from sex until marriage. Abstinence education does not discuss but rejects the use of contraception. The difference between...
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...Why is sex such an unmentionable topic in American culture? In the media and society, students and young adults are constantly bombarded with mentions of sex, but schools are reluctant to talk about it. Though this might not seem like a big deal, this stigma putting sex off-limits from discussion and the disconnection between what kids see in and outside of school has done harm to sex-ed programs in the United States. Many programs throughout the country since the 1970s-80s push for abstinence-only sex education, which promotes the idea that because students are told to wait, they do not need to discuss how to have safe sex. Because of the largely negative effects of abstinence-only sex education on students and the inefficacy of the current...
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...A controversial topic in society is whether sex education should be allowed to be taught in our public-school system. What is sex education you ask? Well sex education is education about sexuality, contraceptive methods, how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, the values of protection and attitudes and principles about sex. Almost every day you hear about how the numbers of teens and preteens are having sex and the rates of teenage pregnancy is high. Can this somehow be prevented by placing sex education in our the school curriculum? There are two kinds of sex education, one being abstinence-only programs and the second one being comprehensive education. Both of these programs teach about the process of sex education which can lead to children understanding about how to make the right choices for...
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...Introduction: Sexual education teaches people that sexuality is a natural, normal, healthy part of life and sexual education is needed in high schools to teach young adults not only the dangers of sex such as unwanted pregnancies or STDs, as well as the many other aspects to sex that aren’t spoken about such as identifying ones sexual preference (gay, straight etc.), relationships, protection, the emotional aspect of it, the maturity required and how sex actually works and not just the sexual organs which is what is usually taught to young adults who are going through adolescence which is a very challenging time for many. Sexual education should clarify the issues involved with the topic and not confuse people. Sexual education is needed everywhere...
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...Reducing Teenage Pregnancies and STDs through Education An Investigation into the increasing number of teenage pregnancies and STDs in the United States Christene M. Staley Western Governor’s University WGU Student ID# 000259544 Why do we need sexual education? In recent years there has been a large debate on how to reduce the number of teenage pregnancies and STDs in the United States. Although many agree that some form of sexual education is needed there are many opinions on what should be taught in schools and at what age. One approach is teaching abstinence only programs compared with teaching young adolescence about sex and contraceptives use and the risks associated with being sexually active. We compare the United States that currently has both the highest teenage pregnancies and STDs among young adolescence compared to other industrialized countries. This examination will show what methods of sexual education has been proven to work and why. Additionally we will examine why other countries have greatly reduced teenage pregnancies and what they are doing that has been effective. There is a significant impact on society and its costing our nation as well as the children of the teenager mothers. (Manlove et al., 2002). The first thing we need to look at is educating teenagers in order to reduce teen pregnancies and STDs. Second we will look at the need to being the discussion of sex at home and educate our children starting as the...
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... Already on Twitter? Content from FacebookTwitter Learn more|Turn off Back to messages Next message Previous message (No Subject) Kayla Tovar 9:38 PM To: Kayla Tovar Picture of Kayla Tovar Sex Education In Public Schools Some of the American public believe that sex educationshould be taught at home by the children's parents. They feel that sex education programs in schools do not put an emphasis on abstinence and encourages children to have sexual intercourse. American culture is very sexually oriented. Sex can be seen all over the media. Charles Krauthammer stated, "Sex oozes from every pore of the culture and there's not a kid in the world who can avoid it"(Bender). After being faced with sex on an everyday basis, the independent teens of today will make their own decisions on whether or not to have sex. The important thing is to make sure that they know all aspects of it. Reality-based sexuality education gives young people an understanding of positive sexuality. I t also provides sexual health information and skills on decision making(What). Subjects include sexual development, reproduction, relationships, affection, intimacy, body image and gender roles(What ). Successful sex education programs have several high points. The high points include exercises to encourage the appraisals of values, and skills in which students...
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...The state of America’s sex education is monumentally sad, even more so in Texas. Children are taught to be afraid of their bodies and to resent any physical attractions, which can lead to psychological problems later in life. Being taught abstinence and to wait for marriage can be damaging in several ways; it can produce a lack of comfort with one’s own body, it can build a general distaste for relationships, and it can create trust issues Being taught abstinence impresses upon a person that sex is wrong or immoral when it is a natural process that has a multitude of health benefits. People may become uncomfortable in their own skin because of the oppressive methods of abstinence teaching. Many lessons in abstinence say that you should “respect...
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...about whether sex education should be taught in schools. The questions of who, why and is it appropriate are still unanswered. The statistics every year shows the rate of teenage pregnancy and the number of teens having sex is escalating in the Caribbean. The percentage of births that take place during adolescence is about 18% in Latin America and the Caribbean (WHO, 2016). Conservatives normally believe that abstinence should be the only policy taught in schools, while liberals feel that statistics shows an increase in risky behaviour amongst teens indicates a need for sex education in the school system. The former Minister of Education Dr. Gopeesingh said, “More than 2, 500 teenage pregnancies...
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