Should we be teaching our kids all about sex in school? Yeah, yeah we should
My father is a legitimately wonderful man. He’s kind, caring, willing to give his shirt off his back, all that stuff. A real mensch, y’know?
He was also a terrible sex-ed teacher. I mean, all-time worst.
I don’t know how old I was, and I swear I don’t even remember if I knew about the birds and the bees at this point, but my father, in his not-quite infinite wisdom, decided to sit me down and tell me all about sex. He used a VCR. And no, he didn’t pop a tape into the VCR to show me a video about how babies are made. He physically used the VCR. The tape was a stand-in for a man, and the VCR receptacle was a stand-in for the woman.
I’ve blocked out the details, but the conversation went something like this …
DAD: So just like you put a tape into the machine, a man puts his …
ME: {passed out}
Suffice it to say this was not the method I used to explain to my 12-year-old son how all this works. In fact, this is how I did it …
ME: So son, when a man loves a woman …
SON: I know dad. Learned it in school.
And thus completes my role as a sex educator. (Honestly, we sat him down and talked about it, and he was pretty well acquainted with the mechanics. He had some questions about some other things adjacent to the basics, and so he’s now pretty well up to speed. Mazel tov, son.)
I bring all this up in light of GOP Jersey gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli getting himself all hot and bothered discussing sexual education in New Jersey’s public schools, which ain’t exactly the same as it was back in the day. (I know you’re going to think I’m making up the following, but I swear it is 100% true: My sex ed teacher in high school was Mr. McPeek - truly - and he was a gym teacher and football coach and wore those high-cut athletic shorts and was fond of saying, “When men were men and sheep were scared,” which I still don’t know exactly what it means, but I have an idea, and he should not have been teaching sex ed. Between him and my dad’s VCR it’s a miracle I don’t hide under the bed when a woman is around. Anyway …)
Anyway, Ciattarelli had this to say back on June 26, and it just surfaced earlier this week: “I feel lucky [our kids] are in their 20s and I don’t have to be dealing with what you’re dealing with right now. You won’t have to deal with it when I’m governor, but we’re not teaching gender ID and sexual orientation to kindergarteners. We’re not teaching sodomy in sixth grade. And we’re going to roll back the LGBTQ curriculum. It goes too far.”
Ciattarelli was taken to task for the comments, and responded in a statement that what he said has “absolutely nothing to do with someone’s sexual orientation and the inference that it does is purposefully misleading … read my statement. It has to do with mature content being taught to young children. That is a parent’s job, not the school district’s.”
You know what? He’s wrong. This is something that should be taught in schools. You know why? When I was in high school, out of the 1,200 or so students, none of them were LGBTQ. Not a single one.
Of course, that is incorrect. Statistically
speaking, there were probably well over a 100 people who were one of those letters. But if they came out and said something about it, they were risking getting beat up in the bathroom.
And you can be sure Mr. McPeek - or my dad - weren’t talking about it, either.
Of course, today, times have thankfully changed, but we’re not even close to being all the way there, no matter how many transgender models grace the pages of Sports Illustrated swimsuit
issue. A person’s sexual orientation should be about as important as the color of their eyes. To not teach this stuff in school is backwards-thinking. Of course it should be taught in school. Kids have questions, and who better to give them answers than people trained to do so.
I want my kids to know everything there is to know. We shouldn’t be ashamed of our sexuality, and I say let the teachers teach. Because if they don’t, then it falls on us, and I don’t even own a VCR.
And let’s not forget: There’s a little something called the internet these days. Pretty sure these kids know how to use Google, right? Why we wouldn’t want to teach our children this stuff is beyond me.