Pro choice

The sex educators had some fun a couple of weeks ago at Jane Galt's. They decided that kids have to have it in our public schools, and that's all there is to it. The comments have been closed and this is too longwinded anyway, so here is my no doubt long-awaited take.

Sex education? Sure, there are plenty of things every human being ought to know about it. But perhaps the main one is simply discipline, whether you're talking keeping your hands off the interns , having sex in church, masturbating in a theater, soliciting gay sex in a public bathroom, a quickie in a car parked on the street or plenty of other things that can be and have been done with people who presumably know more than enough to avoid disease and unwanted pregnancy. Teaching restraint and manners is a lifetime job, and liberals throw a fit any time a public school tries to teach anything that smacks of an ideology other than their own secular religion that dares not speak its name. Yet even the liberals worship condoms, the use of which (or alternatives) requires discipline in itself and fails regularly enough even when used as directed.

And what of consequences of their actions? About the severest consequences modern kids ever suffer in daily life are perhaps losses at video games. Not everything can be reset and restarted, yet we have people trying to eliminate winning and losing from kids' lives lest they suffer a blow to their self-esteem. Yeah, far better than they should learn of consequences from maternity wards, abortion mills, public health clinics or cops. If we want kids to be responsible about sex, maybe we should teach them to be responsible, period. You can't expect it to be taught in schools, especially to kids who don't even have to do chores or earn money.

You also can't teach anybody much of anything practical in sex education. Well, besides unrolling condoms on bananas. That's not very practical unless they're holding the banana below the waist while they're hornier than goats with three testicles and the banana is subject to going bad any instant. And with young guys that might even be enough to end the show (for a couple of minutes, anyway).

When I was a kid there was no sex education in the public schools I attended, but there wasn't a force in the universe that could have stopped me from finding out everything I could on the subject. But knowing how and why sperm are discharged into a vagina didn't help me achieve same, or to get further opportunities if I ever succeeded.

Now what are schools for, anyway? They're publicly funded because we're interested in producing good citizens. Social engineering for sure, but it's intended to complement the parents, not displace them. They don't and shouldn't have the kids 24/7, so they can't teach the kinds of things that require 24/7 teaching (they can only counter them). And the things that require 24/7 teaching would be pretty much anything but the 3 Rs, history, science, vocational education and maybe PE.

What's more, why have the schools teach kids things that they're sure to pick up on their own if they're interested? IMO sex education falls in that category. Likewise with art and music - let the kids stay after school for that if they want it, or leave it as an elective for kids with acceptable achievement in the core subjects.

One of the best things people should be taught is to get the fundamentals right. Apparently liberal school reformers didn't get the news - like all liberals, they'd rather have govt institutions do dozens of things poorly than a few things right. So we clutter schools with irrelevant nonsense at the expense of fundamentals, like a would-be basketball player who can't dribble, pass or shoot but spends his time practicing slam-dunks.

Hey, if you want your kids to get sex education, teach them yourself. If you're not qualified, just how did you have kids, anyway? If you didn't know what caused them then, surely you've learned something since, right?

(Well alright, maybe you adopted the kid(s). Fine. Remind them that even though their mother didn't keep them, she didn't kill them, and maybe they ought to think about that if they ever contemplate an abortion.)

Face it, there simply aren't any good defensible reasons for requiring sex education in schools. There are some bad ones though. Like this. Even if we must require sex ed in the schools, there's no place for that - it's about promoting particular lifestyles, not any sort of essential knowledge.

Hey, I'm just being "pro-choice"...