Doing someone else’s job

Poor Elijah showed up Sunday morning with new lesson plans. “It’s a unit on sleeping,” he enthused. “Pillows, mattresses, blankets — the whole nine yards.”

Hopefully you’re as bewildered as I was. Hopefully you’re asking yourself, “What do mattresses have to do with teaching English?” Of course, if you’re an education expert, sleeping is probably already on your list of life skills that belong in the curriculum. Why not? We already teach students how to eat, brush their teeth, mediate, relax, and abstain from tobacco and alcohol. Sleeping is an equally essential life skill.

The trouble is schools weren’t established to teach us everything that’s essential for life, any more than hospitals were designed to tune-up our cars or teach us to read. Unfortunately, for 40 years we’ve reassigned to schools a multitude of “personal, social, and political” responsibilities that formerly belonged to families or society at large. This began happening around the same time student achievement began to decline. Thirty-five years ago “A Nation at Risk” warned that placing these “conflicting demands” on schools would continue to “exact an educational cost.” Thirty-five years later the nonacademic demands keep coming, and we keep wondering why students aren’t learning much.

Sex education is just one of those nonacademic demands. It ignites an especially heated debate because any discussion of the topic inevitably touches on morality and intimacy. It’s important to remember that all sex education advocates aren’t immoral hedonists, just as all sex education opponents aren’t repressed religious fanatics.

My 1960s sex ed class taught us the names of relevant body parts. Basic information was the point, and we all left knowing what syphilis was and how humans get pregnant.

Sex education has been a growth industry ever since. Consider the prevention debate, where one camp champions condom use while the other promotes abstinence from sex.

Abstinence advocates claim their approach “helps build character and develop the skills to say no,” objectives similar to those advanced by most antidrug programs. Their materials “teach abstinence as the only reliable way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases” and typically mention contraception only in terms of its “failure rates.”

Opponents argue that abstinence programs are “unrealistic” and thereby “put young people in danger,” even though many critics simultaneously employ the same self-esteem exercises and teach the same refusal skills in antidrug programs. They claim abstinence-only is just an “ideology,” “not a public health program.”

Excuse me, but the last time I checked, abstinence, like it or not, is the only surefire method for avoiding pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. This would seem to make it a valid public health alternative, especially when we’re talking about 12-year-olds. Besides, it’s adolescents’ behavior that’s putting them in danger, not somebody else’s suggestion that they not have sex.

The condom crowd crosses the line, too. Call me crazy, but applying condoms to “purple plastic models” and bananas, card games “depicting different forms of sexual contact,” and middle school assemblies that feature discussions of anal intercourse are inappropriate. As for distributing condoms at school, anybody who lacks the initiative to buy his own at WalMart or the convenience store has no business being in the position to require one and probably lacks the responsibility to reliably use the condoms his school gives him.

Many instructors and programs avoid both extremes, which makes it possible for many of us to accept some form of sex education in schools. But what would you think if the only response to Poor Elijah’s sleep curriculum was a debate over whether we should advocate foam or feather pillows. Shouldn’t someone ask whether schools should be teaching this stuff in the first place?

My prime objection to sex education isn’t moral or religious, and I don’t discount the menace to public health that promiscuity poses.

It’s beyond me why any parent would want me to explain sex to his son or daughter. It’s beyond me why schools should be in the condom business, or how your 16-year-old’s abstinence is any of my business. It’s beyond me how sex education advocates can see themselves only as a necessary response to society’s increasingly casual, offhand attitude toward sex and not as part of the cause of that offhand attitude. But ultimately it’s beyond me how anyone could think that teaching students about sex is an appropriate use of precious academic time.

It’s wrong to usurp the rights and responsibilities of all parents just because some fail. It’s wrong to turn public schools, which have proven over decades that they can be successful academic institutions for millions of students, into unsuccessful social services clinics.

Suppose you and I are painting a house. I agree to scrape in the morning, and you agree to paint in the afternoon. Now imagine I don’t finish, or I fail to show up entirely, so when you arrive at noon, you have to spend your time doing my job. The fact that the house doesn’t get painted is my fault, not yours, even though painting was your job. I’m the one who failed in my responsibility.

Schools have made plenty of their own mistakes. But schools are doing worse at their proper job because they’re spending most of their time doing someone else’s job.

Schools aren’t supposed to teach children everything they need to know for life. Schools can teach them to read. Clinics can’t.

It’s wrong to turn public schools, which have proven over decades that they can be successful academic institutions for millions of students, into unsuccessful social services clinics.