Rubber rooms
Algebra? Literature? Science? Naw. Let’s just make sure they know how to put on a condom!
Can anyone spare a banana?
New York City public schools are now offering demonstrations of how to put on a condom. Because, you know, they’ve already mastered teaching kids math and reading. So let’s move on to the important stuff.
Well maybe not. Thirty six percent of students in the city were proficient in math and 31% were proficient in reading. With these teachers in charge of condom demonstrations, I think we’re headed for a lot of unintended pregnancies.
A statement from the city’s Department of Education noted, “Condom demonstrations have long been part of the high school condom availability programs and have been shown to increase rates of condom use. Allowing condom demonstrations in high school health education class will provide students with medically accurate information that can help them stay healthy.”
The policy currently allows students to opt out, and some parents are arguing that students should have to opt in instead.
But why do schools need to be in this business in the first place?
As one health teacher explained, “This was a crucial component that was missing in the comprehensive sex and health education curriculum . . . For some kids, seeing is believing.”
Oh for Pete’s sake. They thought condoms were fairy tales until they saw contraception demon strated in school?
Too many adults today think that when it comes to “information” more is always better. Recently, a sex education teacher in Minneapolis took a dozen students on a field trip to the Smitten Kitten, an adult novelty store. “What I saw happening on our trip, I thought it was beautiful because kids could talk to these sex educators without any shame, without any fear,” Gaia Democratic School director Starri Hedges explained.
Ahh yes, the old theory that too many students are having unsafe sex because they are too afraid to speak with adults about contraception. Come on, people. Have you talked to any 16yearolds lately? Have you seen what they’re wearing? Do you listen to the language coming out of their mouths? Have you looked at their Facebook feeds? Do you get the sense they don’t know how to use Google or that they’re too embarrassed to go into CVS and buy some condoms?
Actually there’s not a great deal of evidence that if only students had more information they’d have safer sex. In his recent book “Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education,” Jonathan Zimmerman notes, “there is . . . scant evidence to suggest that [sex education] affects teen pregnancy or venereal disease rates . . . Scholars around the world have struggled to show any significant influence of sex education upon youth sexual behavior.”
When I was a senior in high school, a new teacher came to our school. Michael Quercio, a selfdescribed AIDS activist who had been recognized by President Bill Clinton, was there to teach us sex education. Prior to his arrival, the closest thing we had to sex ed was “health class” in which boys and girls “married” each other and spent a couple of weeks raising “baby” squash together, with the goal of not dropping them on the floor. (I know, it seems so quaint now. Today, no one would dare to assume we’d want to get married!)
Quercio was convinced we were missing something with our 1950s version of marriage and family. His curriculum, hailed by the local newspaper as a historic milestone, involved much more explicit instructions about the safest and most pleasurable ways to have sex. He even helped students put on a play. The actors engaged in one odd “romantic exchange” after another, placed condoms on bananas, and at one memorable moment one tossed a bucket of prophylactics into the air and announced, “There are so many kinds to choose from.” As if the real reason students weren’t using condoms was that there wasn’t enough variety.
Within a few months, parents pressured the school to let Quercio go. Even the most liberal minded among them began to wonder just how much “information” their high school freshmen needed. Students passed around a petition supporting him.
I’m happy to report the parents won. But the culture has continued to shift in the past two decades. I don’t think they’d win again.