Viewpoints Editor Katy Mayfield likens a purely anatomical sex ed to a driver’s ed that shows students where the gas cap and motor are, but not how to steer or brake. Cartoon by Ashley Lawrence.
By KATY MAYFIELD – Print Viewpoints Editor
Clarke County revolutionized its sex ed, but the job’s not done.
“That’s it?”
The asking of the question is almost a high school tradition, like homecoming or cafeteria pizza.
“Four days, that’s it?”
“A crossword puzzle and an anatomy diagram, that’s it?”
“‘Sex can lead to STIs’, that’s it?”
In 2009, when the Clarke County School District Board of Education voted to make the CCSD the first county in Georgia to teach birth control and contraceptives in addition to abstinence, it vowed to give students more than a “that’s it”.
Why, then, can I count on one hand the facts I learned in my four-hour sex ed class?
We may all know where the ovaries and urethra are, but walk the halls and you’ll still hear Clarke Central High School students say you can tell “virgins” from “non-virgins” by the way they walk and that a girl who comes to a guy’s house to hang out is giving consent for sex.
It’s much harder to enumerate all of the things we didn’t learn in the class: consent, yes means yes or even no means no, the forms of birth control, sexual coercion or the costs of pregnancy.
Yet these topics, in a country where one in six women are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, are vitally important.
Case in point: a 2015 Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation study asked 1,000 college students whether actions like undressing or nodding in agreement constituted consent.
Over 40 percent said they did.
And 40 percent said they didn’t.
That misunderstanding leads not only to sexual assault, but to young men and women being accused of something they never knew they did. Lessons on what constitutes consent could clarify, and prevent tragedy.
The CCSD’s Board and educators should take advantage of the wide latitude state legislation gives districts to craft a truly comprehensive sex ed curriculum, with student input, and mandate it at CCSD high schools.
Researchers rightly compare an entirely academic and theoretical sex ed–the collections of warnings and diagrams we currently get–to giving a teenager a car and telling him where the motor and gas cap are, but not teaching him to steer or brake.
He’s going to crash the car. Unless we teach kids not just where their own parts are, but how to use with care, Clarke County’s roads will be filled with irresponsible drivers.
