From Our Blog: Sex Talk And Our Failing Schools 

I, for lack of a better word, enjoy reading the online reactions to the end of funding for abstinence-only education.  There is a lot about socialism and big government, and about how Obama will eventually take all of our children as soon as they are born, instead of waiting until they are old enough to be in school.  There are the expected tales of depravity, that children are learning to "spit or swallow", that Democrats are perverse, disgusting, deviant.  All this I expect.

But there is another reaction, popular and a bit different.  It has a quiet type of exasperation, a subtle "common-sensibility" to it.  This reaction focuses ostensibly on the general failings of compulsory education.  Comprehensive sex education opponents are worried about spending more time and energy teaching about sexuality, when kids in the US are lagging behind other countries in their performance of the conceived fundamentals of knowledge: reading, writing, and math.

Furthermore, schools which do not meet contrived standards in these most "rigorous" of areas are accused of losing credibility to teach other subjects, like sex education.  We see the expansion of the idea that our school system is losing sight of, and failing at, its most important job.  In this imagined arrangement, the more thoughtful and time consuming the curriculum, the more it will be robbing our children of their tenuous futures.

As US adults more generally embody a fear of losing our country's "competitive edge", it is suddenly selfish, even dangerous, to be comprehensive about something as ordinary as the sex-lives of our children.  In this narrative, the drumbeat of another global economic superpower marches to depose us, while we are wasting our resources on expendable areas of learning.

If accusations of depravity cease to carve a space for abstinence-only education, what will the next functional panic be?  Will fear of a failing school system and slipping global dominance be fanned in order to stall progress of holistic sexuality education?