Students and Sex
As time passes, it seems as if the teenage pregnancy rate gets higher and higher, instead of decreasing. Some people inculpate it on how parents edified their teens when they were children. Others claim that the pregnancy rate is on the up because of the sex education curriculum that schools teach today. These parents feel that schools are sending the wrong message to their children. They feel that schools are teaching students that it is okay to have sex as long as it is protected sex. Some of the parents who are opposed to the current curriculum say that if there was a new curriculum that was based on the concept of abstinence and the cost of being pregnant, the teenage pregnancy rate would not be so high. With the current curriculum, schools are not teaching students about the urge of waiting to have sex. Instead, schools teach students about how to have protective sex. Even though schools teach students about protected sex, they do not remind students that there is still a possibility that they may end up pregnant. Even if they use condoms, or use birth control, there is always a chance of conceiving a child. Some teenagers are mature, and are able to think things through before they do something that may get them in trouble. On the other hand, there are teens who lose all of their common sense when their hormones arise. In fact, “Knowledge alone is not enough to change behaviors. Programs that rely mainly on conveying information about sex or moral precepts—how the body’s sexual system functions, what teens should and shouldn’t do—have failed” (Bailey 16). It is important to teach students about the true meaning of what is safe sex, and to think about what they are doing before they put their thoughts into action. Kathrin Stanger-Hall and David Hall writes:
As parents, educators or policy makers it should be our goals that (1) teens can