Zoe STRIMPEL

Earlier this year, I was lured into a promising and lengthy back and forth with an eligible bachelor. Well, he looked eligible. Good-looking, good job, intelligent and witty. He was even keen to meet when I got back from the US – in the flesh. It was arranged. I texted to confirm the night before and, when an hour passed with no reply, I sensed it was one of those sticky silences that would last an eternity. And so it did.

The next day, I wrote that I assumed we weren’t meeting at 3pm as planned, and that I hoped he was OK. No reply.

Uncharacteristically, a few days later after seeing an Instagram story showing he was alive and well, I left a voicenote saying I was baffled by this behaviour. He sent an anaemic text the next day apologising and saying he hadn’t felt up to it and it was easier just to go quiet.

In the scheme of things, this was a minor sting. But the fact is that I am often, indeed very frequently, hurt and puzzled by the behaviour of would-be and former dates. Said behaviour is often simply rude; flagrantly, lazily contradictory, and – in the sexual domain – frequently oscillates between the dysfunctional and the dehumanising. It’s tough out there. So I can sympathise with the urge to find a quick fix to prevent all this heartache and anxiety.

But the idea that the solution lies in online assessments and forms? Too weird to countenance.

And yet. A survey of 1,004 students by the Higher Education Policy Institute think tank and YouthSight has found that most students think it should be compulsory to pass a sexual consent assessment before higher education. They believe such assessments will protect them from awkward, unpleasant feelings and experiences.

There’s no doubt that when you mix copious amounts of alcohol, the hormones of 18- and 19-year-olds, and the thrill of being away from home, some messy situations – even some unequivocally bad ones – are likely to occur. It’s even possible, if there are any bad eggs in the crop, that some criminal behaviour could take place.

But the possibility of getting into unwanted sexual situations seems to have left school-leavers more afraid than excited to go to university. In addition to the 58 per cent who think all students need to pass a consent exam, 51 per cent want compulsory sex and relationships education during the welcome period.

They are jittery rather than raring to go, and no wonder: 43 per cent of undergraduates start as virgins while, more worrying, over a third said they “learned more about sex from porn than from formal education”.

Parking for a moment the weirdness of a world in which young people think the two options for learning about sex are porn and school lessons, it seems tragic that a whole generation thinks that you can control the world and protect yourself beyond the school gates if only the powers-that-be forced your peers to fill in forms avowing they will behave with full appropriateness.

Much of the problem comes from what seems to be highly exaggerated expectations for school. Once the annoying, boring but necessary place you had to go every day where at least (small comfort) you saw your friends, school seems to have become the be-all-and-endall of total education, not just in maths, but in life. We used to laugh through sex ed and dismiss our teachers.

Now, however, it seems that schools – and teachers – have become tasked with an awesome responsibility to protect and prepare kids for... everything. When pupils hit life and get a rude shock, instead of taking the rough with the smooth, learning and enjoying it, they seem not only to be crumbling, but to want to blame it all on school.

Thus the survey found that 77 per cent of students thought that school did not prepare them for the reality – the messy, unpredictable reality – of sex and relationships. Someone needs to tell these kids, and fast, that nothing will prepare them for that reality, apart from experience – and especially not school teachers. Passively expecting to have everything neatly packaged up into right and wrong and spoonfed by the educational authorities is a recipe for disaster and disappointment.

In part, it’s our overheated culture of political correctness that is to blame for this overreliance on school. Instead of sticking to science, maths and books, teachers have been encroaching ever further on students’ personal, emotional and political development.

It’s time to get school’s proper role in a child’s life cut down to size, and to urgently get the message across to school-leavers that life is exciting, imperfect, and above all, cannot be prepared for in the classroom.

It’s time to get school’s proper role in a child’s life cut down to size