When I was in high school, I took a class that taught me how to dissect a worm. We were not expected to go home and dissect worms or somehow put to use our newly found expertise on worm anatomy. Still, I remember that dissection teaching me ideas and skills I used later on: How to carefully cut something open and learn about its insides; why exactly a worm is shaped the way it is; the similarities between worms and humans (we both have hearts! Sort of).
In another class, I learned how to write a check and balance a checkbook. I didn’t have a bank account in my name at the time, but the information stuck.
Algebra felt useless at first, but gave me the tools I needed to crunch numbers in later classes like physics and population genetics.
So why, when we talk about sex ed classes for teenagers, do we focus on what students will do with the information they learn right now? A conservative arguing for abstinence-only education, or a more evidence-minded person talking about which type of sex ed “works” better, are only focusing on immediate outcomes: Do kids go home and have sex? If they do, are they getting pregnant or contracting STDs?
Imagine if we set curricula this way for all subjects: Choose the content for math classes based on the math we expect kids to do in their daily life. Pare down art curricula so that kids won’t be able to use what they learn in making graffiti.
Or, more shockingly, imagine that we taught sex ed with the same goals as academic subjects: Preparing students for life after high school.
Even in the fantasy world where students never have sex while they’re young enough to still be taking sex ed classes, almost all will have sex later on. They’ll need to know about consent and pleasure and risks. Many will need to know about fertility and how pregnancy works.
What happens then?
It turns out they might remember what they learned in sex ed, and that’s not a good thing. Take this 2012 study by Chelsea Polis and Laurie Zabin of Johns Hopkins. They found that 19% of young women and 13% of young men believed they were infertile. Those numbers are far higher than the actual prevalence of infertility in that age group, which means there could be a significant chunk of sexually active young people who believe, incorrectly, that they can’t get pregnant. Here’s the likely reason why:
Polis and Zabin point out that some public health messages designed to encourage consistent contraceptive use focus on the fact that pregnancy can occur after a single act of unprotected intercourse and do not adequately explain the probability of pregnancy.
…an oversimplified message may inadvertently lead some individuals to assume they are infertile if pregnancy does not occur after one or several acts of unprotected sex, and may result in reduced motivation to use contraceptives. [quote from the study’s press release]
Focusing on the actual statistics involved in pregnancy would help young people understand their fertility. They also need enough information to understand the real risk of pregnancy from different contraceptives. (Not “condoms fail all the time” but how often do they fail with perfect and with typical use, and how do you achieve perfect use?) A few lucky women might stumble across a copy of Taking Charge of Your Fertility, but why isn’t a basic understanding of the human reproductive system standard issue?
I recently taught a nutrition course to a group of students fresh out of high school. When we got to the part about pregnancy and infant nutrition, they asked some honest questions that made me back up and start from the basics: for example, they weren’t clear on what the beginnings of pregnancy have to do with a woman’s monthly cycle. The 40-week accounting of a 38-week pregnancy was unfathomable to them, because they didn’t realize there was this thing called ovulation that happens two weeks into the cycle. They didn’t realize that when you get pregnant, there’s a lag of several weeks before you’re even able to test for pregnancy. And like I was taught years ago, they thought it was possible for a woman to become pregnant at any time in her cycle. (Possible, perhaps, but extremely rare—and focusing on that possibility means ignoring the biology of how the cycle typically works.)
Along the same lines, kids also need real information and statistics on types of contraceptives, including how to choose one when you need it. So what if they don’t need it right away? They don’t need algebra right now either. But someday they’ll be using math to program the next Angry Birds, and someday they’ll be using their knowledge of contraceptives to decide whether or not to use condoms that night, or whether they should be asking their doc for an IUD.
We have national debates on how best to scare teens away from sex, and sometimes step back enough to debate whether we should scare teens away from sex. But there’s a bigger question we’re missing: what happens when those teens grow up?
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