Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I’m scrambling around getting ready for school and what not, but let me note that Courtney Martin’s TAP article calling for more holisitic sex education, is a classic proposal that wouldn’t last one day in an actual school, with actual teenagers. Here, Martin quotes sociologist Jessica Fields:

“Sex education’s aim need not be limited to reducing rates of adolescent pregnancies, disease, and sexual activity. Rather, the aim would be to create classroom environments in which students and teachers listen to one another out of a commitment to recognizing and contending with sexual desires, power, and inequality. In a critical feminist sex education program, students and teachers would confront and strive to suspend — even momentarily — the sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism inside and outside the classroom.”

In this way, the classroom becomes not a reflection of our larger culture of sexual repression and explosion, but a more honest, more enlightened way of relating to ourselves and our own desires.

Yeeeeeeah. That would totally work. Get a bunch of teenagers, and an awkward, out of touch teacher (they all are) to reflect on “our larger culture of sexual repression” and start to talk about the wonders of female genital stimulation (that’s later in the article).  We can, of course, just ignore the fact that even mentioning these types of proposals would probably doom regular, comprehensive sex ed. Can you imagine anything more horrifying, more confirming of stereotypes about social liberals, to a parent on the fence about real sex or absintence only?

But let’s get back to the substance. The biggest problem with these types of proposals to insert all sorts of progressive values and Frierian pedagogy into education is that they vastly overstate the importance of school to the overall formation of a kid. Kids, at least in my experience, don’t form their political, cultural or moral values at school. They hang out with their friends, go to class, and then after school is done, go and do things they’re actually interested in. Students also have an automatic scepticism of most anything teachers tell them, and something tells  me that said scepticism would be increased if some sex-ed teacher started talking about sex beyond the standard “wrap your shit, take your pills and don’t get pressured into sex” message that constitutes most comprehensive sex-ed Schools have trouble enough teaching very basic things – how many of you remember the quadratic formula or how the periodic table is arranged?  To think that they can turn everyone into some mix of Dan Savage and Judith Butler is just pure utopianism.

I should also point out that teenagers can learn to appreciate sex as not just dangerous and baby-risking all on their own. They really don’t need to be convinced by their teachers on that point.