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Sex Education in the Schools
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16815 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
1,024 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
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We take considerable pride at THE WORLD & I in presenting contrasting points of view on controversial topics. Yet we have not done so this month. In our series on sex education in our schools, only one lone voice dissents from the judgment that the prevailing orthodoxy is wrong. That author says merely that claims of the harmful effects of sex education are tenuous and that such programs may dispel some ignorance. But he does not claim that they have any positive effects.
Yet, as the other articles make clear, the current orthodoxy prevails because its supporters view sex education as scientific and liberating. How can we possibly justify the exclusion of their voice--particularly given the prevailing consensus of the media and intellectuals that such sex education courses are desirable?
The reader will quickly see that the articles we carry are not strident, anti-intellectual, resistant to evidence, or governed by a hidden agenda. But the facts they reveal shocked me when I read them. It had never occurred to me that ten- to twelve-year-olds would be shown graphic pictures of oral and anal sex, that children as young as ten would be taught that all forms of sexual activity, including with the same sex, are equally normal, or that the course contents should be concealed from parents. Indeed, if the articles had been written in a different tone and were less well documented, or if the authors were less respectable, I probably would have refused to believe the claims.
Perhaps the supporters of the new orthodoxy are correct. Until Einstein established relativity theory, it seemed as clear as anything could be that space was Euclidean and that if could not be possible for time on each of two independent inertial systems to be going more slowly relative to the other.
The public was slower to accept relativity theory than were physicists, who would have been derelict in their duty if they had not imposed their views on course materials. Do scholars in the field of sex have a sufficient claim to expertise to impose their views on course materials?
A justification based on an analogy with physics would be inapt. Physics is a subject in which evidence and reasoning are more powerful and more conclusively established than is the case in the social sciences. Even in physics many things are subject to uncertainties--the significance of the redshift, for instance. Moreover, the applications of physics to the real world, as in designing an ABM system or even an airplane, leave much room for legitimate controversy.
Society is the product of a number of factors--such as politics, social relationships, economics, culture--that are responsive to different frames of reference. And this intensifies the problem of reaching valid conclusions. Even in the relatively simple field of economics, the experts cannot agree on policy. And doctors change their minds every ten years about whether heat or cold should be applied to burns. It is far easier to disrupt a working system than it is to reconstruct it, and most radical social changes are destructive. The Soviet Union and China are two good examples.
Furthermore, the evidence, to the extent that it exists, seems to argue against the current orthodoxy. Perhaps we cannot prove a
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