So John McCain has blasted Obama quite often for Obama’s support of sex education for kindergartners. Obama has clarified his position in that he wants to warn children about sexual predators. Now, Enlgand, a sterotypically prudish country, is implementing legilsation that makes sex education mandatory for…wait…that’s right…
KINDERGARTNERS!
Really? You ask. Yes, really. Why? You ask. Well, it seems that England has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Europe, and they arte sick of it. They want to educate their children on the topic of sex, and they want to start young.
Now before everybody starts hating England more than you already do, and shouting all kinds of viscious, and no doubt clever, insults just listen (or read) for a moment.
They do not propose to teach sex to kindergartners, or supply them with contraceptives, or anything like that. They do, however, plan on having children name body parts, including **gasp** the sexual ones. They want children to become aware of their bodies, and the differences between boys and girls, men and women. Some, of course, oppose this and think it is a bad idea, as well as a the state making a decision that should be left up to parents. One woman was quoted as saying something like “I want to choose when the word penis enters my son’s vocabulary.”
I don’t have children, and I will not even pretend to know what it is like to be a parent. I will, however, say this; Parents, unless you totally control your child’s life, you have very little control over what words become part of your child’s vocabulary, especially once your child is in school. I remember once I called our dog a bastard. My mother heard me and asked me what I had said. I said the word again. Then she asked me where I heard that word and if I knew what it meant. She wasn’t mad, but she was concerned. I had heard the word at school, and as I was like six or seven at the time I had no idea what it meant. My point is, whether the word is penis or bastard or onomatopoeia, your children will learn these words.
They will hear them from friends at school who heard them from their parents or their older siblings. It is human nature to speak, and it is child nature to ask questions, use words they are not supposed to, and seek out things forbidden things.
Let the shcools teach sex eduication to youngsters. Treat them as intelligent (if not fully developed) beings, and take some of the taboo out of it. We will never be comfortable with sex unntil we start talking about it. And if we take steps to educate and infuse our children with knowledge of how babies come to be (you can still talk about the stork, but sooner or later that will be exposed for the lie that it is) when they are young, we might be able to stop the crazy amounts of unplanned pregnancies ripping across England and America.
Of course, there are just no helping some people. I know several people who already have one child that they are having difficulty supporting, and yet still do not use protection when they have sex. There is nothing implicitly wrong with sex, and there is nothing implicitly wrong with pregnancy or having a baby, but when you are having unprotected sex, when you already have a child that you struggle to care for, there is something wrong with that. Babies are not toys, and they don’t fix relationships. They are babies, and babies grow up to be children who then grow into teenagers and finally adults (at least in theory), and if we start teaching that, only good can come from it.
Babies are wonderful, to be sure. They are cute and cuddly and darling. It is hard to be in a bad mood when you are around babies, but we also need to start teaching kids the responsibilites involved with them. They are not dolls, they are living breathing beings that are helpless and need someone else to take care of them
I’m rambling and losing focuse so I will stop here with this: Good job England on your decision to bring the awareness of sex education to the youngsters.
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