Rod Dreher

What the Vatican document says, and doesn’t say

Sexualizing children in public schools, part two

By Rod Dreher • October 24, 2011, 7:43 PM

Coming to NYC public schools, the mandatory sex ed program. Among its features, according to a report in the NY Post:

Workbooks reviewed by The Post include the following assignments:

* High-school students go to stores and jot down condom brands, prices and features such as lubrication.

* Teens research a route from school to a clinic that provides birth control and STD tests, and write down its confidentiality policy.

* Kids ages 11 and 12 sort “risk cards” to rate the safety of various activities, including “intercourse using a condom and an oil-based lubricant,’’ mutual masturbation, French kissing, oral sex and anal sex.

* Teens are referred to resources such as Columbia University’s Web site Go Ask Alice, which explores topics like “doggie-style” and other positions, “sadomasochistic sex play,” phone sex, oral sex with braces, fetishes, porn stars, vibrators and bestiality.

Go Ask Alice also gives advice on whether or not its a good idea to consume your partner’s feces in sex play (answer: no, but playing with it can be fine as long as you’re wearing gloves).

According to Princeton’s Robbie George, kids have to go through most of this; there are only very limited drop-out options. These people are crazy and evil both.

16 Responses to Sexualizing children in public schools, part two

Scott Lahti says:

October 24, 2011 at 8:00 pm

“Kids ages 11 and 12 sort ‘risk cards’ to rate the safety of various activities, including…mutual masturbation…intercourse using a condom and an oil-based lubricant…”

After which the 11s, their assignments completed and recess begun, commence to play my own favorite card game when I was their age – Slapjack – while the 12s get to play Slapandticklejack; just don’t slap and/or tickle him too much, lest he become royally flushed…
Naturalmom says:

October 24, 2011 at 8:23 pm

Whoa, seriously? I’m in favor of sex ed in schools, but this goes waaaay to far. I went to 2 different high schools — one with a general sex ed program and one without. The amount dangerous misinformation being passed around the school without was shocking. (I attended the sex ed school first, then transferred.) So I believe it makes sense to provide kids with basic information about their bodies, how babies are made, and the consequences of STDs. I would also be in favor of providing information about birth control methods in some way — printed material perhaps. My school did not provide this; the teacher told us she was forbidden to discuss birth control in any way. When I went home and asked my (Christian fundamentalist) parents what the reason was for that stupid rule, my mother said, “They’re afraid you might learn something you need to know.” LOL! My parents actually had a small argument about that comment, so I remember it!

But yeah, if true, the stuff outlined above goes way beyond anything I would support. Based on my circle of friends, I would guess that many other pro-sex-ed parents would feel the same way, so please don’t paint all pro-sex-ed parents with this nasty brush. Has this stuff been adopted? I bet once parents get wind of it, there will be some changes…
TTT says:

October 24, 2011 at 8:33 pm

Ummm…. Several of those are really fine by me. Having high school kids learn where condoms are sold and STDs treated? That’s an affirmatively Good Idea. The one about 10-year-olds is too early, and the operative word in another is “teens”… I wonder why the source kept their age vague?

Driving a car is one of the most dangerous things a teenager will ever do, and most parents love it when schools teach them the safe, responsible way to do it. But of course it doesn’t belong in 5th grade.
Charles Cosimano says:

October 24, 2011 at 10:02 pm

the older I get the more I believe in home schooling. This sort of nonsense is one of the reasons.

I’m a libertine myself, always have been, but dammit these are little kids.
Deggjr says:

October 24, 2011 at 10:07 pm

The source is the NY Post? You might want to keep the outrage temperature at simmer until you verify the story.
nfauerso says:

October 24, 2011 at 10:51 pm

It says teens are referred to, Go Ask Alice. That doesn’t seem compulsory. I have no problem with this. I’m 29, when I was a kid my classmates were losing their virginity at 12 or 13 so it makes sense to educate them at 11 or 12.
Naturalmom says:

October 24, 2011 at 11:24 pm

Morris Howard, as a mom of a girl whose body started changing earlier than I would have chosen for her, I object to the idea that those changes mean that the little girl is no longer a little girl. Believe me, 9 and 10 year old girls with “signs of development” are just as tender and young as their flat-chested, later-blooming peers, and they need to have the last years of their childhood respected and protected. They need to learn about body changes, taking care of themselves, and that they will grow into their new bodies, but for the vast majority of them, “how to have safe sex” can certainly wait. When my daughter began going through changes, I was very frustrated that so many books about it talked about how the changes meant she was “becoming a woman.” Um no, she was still years and years away from being a woman, and several years away from being a teenager even. Ultimately I found the American Girl book, “The Care and Keeping of You” which is about puberty for young girls and does not get into relationships with boys. I highly recommend it as a resource for young girls going through the first stages of body changes. It made my girl feel good about being a *girl*, without having to worry about “becoming a woman” before she was ready or that she was going to have to deal with boys, whom she still thought of as “gross” at that point.

I *am* glad we were homeschooling during that time. (And that we still are.) She was able to get used to her fuller body without enduring snide comments or worse. I had a chat with her the other day about how she feels about her body right now. (She’s 11, with the body of a teenager.) She is amazingly not-hung-up about anything to do with her body. She’s not even horribly bothered by her acne, which has come on strong this year. I suspect that would not be the case if she had been teased, as I imagine she might have been, had she been in school. I still think the sex information is too much too soon, at least for the 11 and 12 year olds, but if they are going to do it, I hope the NYC curriculum is also spending lots of time on sensitivity and respect and choices and not using this information to harass and embarrass fellow students. That’s probably too much to hope for though…
cecelia says:

October 25, 2011 at 12:28 am

B efore one believes this is the end of civilization – there is a huge outcry now that these details have surfaced in NYC. Even the NYC news stations are carrying on about it – so I would not jump to the stereotypical conclusion that this is typical of those liberal no good New Yorkers.

25 years ago 6th graders in NJ schools had to practice putting condoms on wooden dildos in their coed gym classes.
I had a friend whose turn it was to pick up her daughter and friends that day – she had a mini van full of hysterical little girls
tearfully proclaiming they would never have sex after viewing this wooden dildo. When this particular Mom then followed up by seeing the school principal to tell him how the girls reacted to this lesson – he said that since she had an Italian surname he assumed she was Catholic and therefore a victim of sexual repression and so disregarded her complaint.
True story. I tyhought she should have gotten a lawyer and sued the heck out of the school – just to teach the idiot a lesson.

I would say that what both the NJ and NY curriculums have in common is some small minority of nitwits who controlled a curriculum development committee and came up with this nonsense. Seems obvious that anyone who would think it was a good idea to have 10 year old girls practice putting condoms on a wooden dildo in a coed gym class knows nothing about kids. LOL – and they claim that growing up Catholic traumatized kids !

The thing that truly knocks me out about these sex ed programs is that the same people who cannot teach your kids to read,write and calculate are now going to be successful in teaching them to exercise their sexuality responsibly??
Jon says:

October 25, 2011 at 12:31 am

I guess better “Go Ask Alice” than the pro-feces eating site.
Rod Dreher says:

October 25, 2011 at 12:45 am

I guess better “Go Ask Alice” than the pro-feces eating site.

Go Ask Alice *is* the poo-eating site. Well, it warns that you’ll probably get sick if you eat your partner’s poo, but you can play with it and not worry as long as you’re wearing gloves.

Yes, we are having this conversation. I can’t imagine why every country in the world wouldn’t want to be just like America.
James says:

October 25, 2011 at 12:50 am

New York State has always been terrible about this.

In my little, rural school (7-12th grade: 350 students) in central New York, some old woman had to come into class and put a condom on that wooden dildo thing starting in 6th grade. Of course everybody snickered about it.

The videos about masturbation and wet dreams were similarly cheesy.
MH - Scientismist says:

October 25, 2011 at 7:35 am

OK the feces talk just made me gag while drinking my Starbuck.

When I was that age the sex ed was a very clinical discussion of the mechanics and consequences of sex. I think they were trying to bore us out of trying any of it. I had already surmised most of it by being aware of the world around me.

Random thing to consider. How many of you have set up content filtering on your home network? For those that have, do you know what an open proxy server is? How about the onion router?

I am not saying it is good or bad, but preventing access to information is really hard in our culture. A Google image search without filters can yield much more than you bargain for, even on innocuous terms.
Tom S says:

October 25, 2011 at 10:33 am

In my 7th grade sex ed course (back when dinosaurs walked the earth–1970s) student questions included whether or not you could get VD from oral sex or from animals. I suspect everyone concerned would have rather had access to a resource that answered those questions in private…
Clare Krishan says:

October 25, 2011 at 1:25 pm

And we volunteer CCD teachers have an hour a week to eradicate all this occlusion of reason in favor of a lucidity of faith…. well, those of us who care to jump all the hoops on “protecting God’s children” that the Chancery puts in our path that is…Robbie George needs to start paging the USCCB …
‘sex’ whose sex?
‘education’ whose education?
‘children’ whose children?

(There is a reciprocal function in my trinitarian set of 3 talking points… but the logical positivist 2-D thinkers amongst us would prefer to overlook integral human development, and leave the procreative meaning of conjugal relations to St Augustine and others of his ilk:
http://www.faith.org.uk/Publications/Magazines/Sep11/Sep11ContraceptionAndTheImperfectionOfNaturalFamilyPlanning.html)
maxsnafu says:

October 25, 2011 at 1:48 pm

How many reasons does someone need to pull their kids out of public schools? Public “education” is a form of child abuse.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

October 25, 2011 at 3:53 pm

More crazy than evil, but the results are about the same. Some people just can’t offer enough of a useful thing. Sex education should be about basic biology, a few standards of social etiquette, and a caution that there is no need to be too anxious to explore too quickly. Let the kids find out the other details on their own.

I could have done without some of those details myself, but I had heard them already in some really hard core music a co-worker liked to play on the night shift, until everyone including the supervisor told him to tone it down.

I wonder what happens if a student fails sex education because they refuse to turn in a few homework assignments? Is it required for graduation, or does it just lower your GPA a little? I really would have skipped a few of these when I was in high school, let along junior high.