Sex Ed and Children having Children

I recently read an article in the Evening Post (Bristol,UK) about a secondary that used live naked men and women as teaching tools for its sex education class. The children were allowed to ask the models to move about and pose to better display their bodies. I would like to point out that the models were not accessible to the children and could only be viewed on a screen, there was no physical contact allowed. The story went on to praise this method of teaching and how much students learned from the experience. The workshop was set up to “give young people the sex education they are missing.” Apparently secondary schools across that country, along with channel four, have taken up the task of delivering the sexual education that parents should be providing.

After I read the story I found that there was an area for reader comments. Every now and then, if a story has struck a nerve in me, I will comment on an article. I take the trouble to sign up for an account that I will probably never use again just to voice my opinion. When I was deciding what to write for this story I did what I always do and read the comments that were already posted. One comment really got to me. It was from a woman who had lived through being a child mom and apparently had no issues with it. She had become pregnant at 15 and said that it was not her parents fault. She was from a “good home” and they had not been irresponsible. This person was already in an online conversation with another woman who had expressed her views about the sexual education techniques and the reasons for the increasing teenage pregnancy and STD rates. I felt that I had to put my two American cents in, which couldn’t be worth all that much with the current exchange rate.
In my post I mentioned that sex education should be the responsibility of the parent and that this type of teaching experiment offends me. As a matter of course there were the posts from the weak minded who attacked me based on the location attached to my screen name, but I ignored them. The conversation that followed moved away from the topic of sex education and into the realm of children having children. I tried to point out to the woman from the “good home” that having a child at the age of fifteen may not be the best thing to do. It’s not good for the parents or for the child or for the child of the child (there are three generations involved in that decision). She seemed unwilling to admit that there could have been mistakes in her past because things are working out well now. I guess what I was trying to say to the readers of the article and to that person in particular was “who is at fault here?” Is the young girl at fault for knowingly becoming pregnant, or is it the parents fault for not educating the girl about the consequences of those types of actions. Personally I believe that it is the parent’s responsibility to watch after their children and to keep them from making these types of mistakes by a combination of education, discipline and attentiveness. We have to teach our children that it is not acceptable to become pregnant at such a young age as well as teaching the mechanics of the situation. The article can be found here.