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EDITORIALS: Abstinence-only education has been proven to not work well. Should it be stopped or does it have some value?
FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2007 WWW.KANSAN.COM
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
PAGE 7A
OUR VIEW
FACE/OFF: ABSTINENCE-ONLY EDUCATION
It refuses to adapt to an ever-changing world
A recent study commissioned by Congress revealed last week what pragmatists have long suspected: that abstinence-only sex education is failing. The study found that students who participated in abstinence education programs were not only just as likely as non-participants to have sex, but also frequently had the same number of sexual partners.
Programs that promote abstinence more than safe sex have been criticized for years as ignorant and wholly impractical, and perhaps even dangerous, in their opposition to birth control. Not surprisingly, the debate has often been heated and fraught with theological implications. Further, the implementation and execution of abstinence programs in American schools has cost taxpayers around $175 million a year, making it an issue that affects every taxed American.
Though many critics will tell you differently, the primary problem of abstinence education has never been its admittedly unsettling religious overtones, which can come perilously close to religious education in public schools. The real problem with abstinence education is that it is rooted in absolutism, and thus refuses to acknowledge both adaptations and realities of the evolving world around it.
The programs make one dangerous assumption: that with proper motivation, hormone-saturated teenagers can be convinced to overcome their most primal urges. This goal is noble in purpose and perhaps someday achievable in practice, but, as this study confirms, has proven both impractical and costly in practice.
In the face of increasing teenage sexual activity, the answer is not to retreat into a shell of blind ignorance of the world around us. Uncomfortable though it may make us, educators must acknowledge and address practical solutions.
The roads of history are littered with institutions and organizations that refused to adapt to changing realities - sex education is
too integral to children's health to become one of those institutions.
The study did include one positive note: students in abstinence programs were no more likely to have unprotected sex than those in other programs. A criticism of abstinence programs has been that their ignorance of birth control can lead to more unprotected sex, but this study dispels that point. At the very least, we can take solace in this result of abstinence programs.
Abstinence-only programs may someday be suitable in American education, but for now they have proven too costly and too unfeasible. Proponents of such programs would do well to recall the strange and new tension of their own teenage years, and to recognize that absolute and unilateral solutions rarely fit complicated health dilemmas.
McKay Stangler for the editorial board.
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To the girl with the red boots who was sleeping under the tree outside of Anschutz: I think you're
Grant Snider/KANSAM
My Western Civ teacher will no longer use Powerpoint, because she feels bullet points are a threat to society and are dangerous.
--ing that he's not talking him out of staving here next year.
Not even Chuck Norris would live in Margaret Amini's scholarship hall.
ing that he's not talking him out of staving here next year.
I just drove by Burger King, and I saw Julian Wright with Brandon Rush leaving there. I'm really hoping that he's not talking him out of staving here next year.
图
Dear small, little gray car, sorry for almost running you over. Love, big truck
Dear campus, learn to flush!
I hope I'm not alone in this, but I have a very strong sexual attraction to the assurance girl.
--guys running naked down Jayhawk Boulevard.
Free for All makes me so nervous when I call it, because I get stage fright
Our generation shall continue in this cycle of violence until we learn how to live with our fellow
I just beat "Freebird" on Expert Suck it, Lynyrd Skynyrd!
I am drunk, it is about midnight, and I am covered in mud because I was just in Potter's Lake! I rode down in a cart.
hode down
It's 4:00,and I just saw three
图
Free for All I don't know what to do with myself. I've been calling you constantly, day after day, and you never pick up. I don't get it! You come, you make love to me, and then you never talk to me again? Is that how it's gonna be?
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compete with that?
Is that how it's gonna be?!
I love warm weather. Your mood goes up, and your class attendance goes way down.
Abolishing it presumes teens can't make tough choices
--compete with that?
night
Gordon, don't be such a d-bag.
I didn't brush my teeth last night.
It'll never happen again!
Oh noes! They caught me masturbating in the elevator again. Skeet, skeet, skeet.
17-year-old in Truman, Minn. — a dying town — bought and managed a failing grocery store with $10,000 hed saved and a nonprofit group's help, boosting the dismal downtown economy. Just a couple weeks ago, a 17-year-old boy in Las Vegas ran into a burning house to save seven children.
The recent findings about the failure of abstinence-only education shouldn't be surprising, for several reasons. First, there's the question of how much classroom content is remembered or understood at all. Frequent dismal test scores show that understanding it well enough for a test is hard enough, let alone in the heat of a puppy-love moment. Could you currently pass your 11th-grade history final? Diagram a sentence?
Then there's the matter of what abstinence education has to compete with. Any women's magazine is replete with advertisements for the pill. Rap songs, pop songs, rock songs, jingles, commercials, and most prime-time TV shows feature sex as a primary subject, object, end-goal, punchline and selling point. Teenagers — who, as a demographic, spend enormous amounts of time on the Internet — are bombarded with advertisements for lotion that makes your skin sexier; pills that make your penis larger; perfume that makes you irresistible. How can some stodgy lesson about the satisfaction of hand-holding
It can't. But that doesn't mean we — as parents, teachers or taxpayers — should throw up our hands and say, "They're going to do it anyway — might as well slip a condom in the bookbag."
Because teenagers, despite the raging hormones and those godawful moments of angst — aren't idiots, and they aren't animals driven exclusively by hormones. In every civilization but our post-World War II Western one, teenagers were expected to have jobs, help support a family, get married and have children. That a person reaches adult size and proportions at that age isn't an unfortunate mistake; it's a biological indication of some adult capability.
To be sure, a return to arranged marriages for 16-year-olds would be awful, and all those other civilizations had less freedoms and equality. Also, teenagers are often hysterical, emotional and impulsive — which is why they can't buy alcohol and are tried differently for crimes.
So it's not that teenagers aren't capable of waiting. Holding off on sex isn't as difficult as running into a burning house. Though more education about sex is better than less, abstinence isn't a lost cause.
But they are capable of making difficult decisions. Last year, a
Reducing teenage pregnancy, STI's and out-of-wedlock children are essential goals. But an attitude that those things are inescapable without contraception is extremely dangerous. It's insulting and demeaning and lends itself too easy to excuses and a lack of accountability.
Before calling for a hold on abstinence-only education, consider the danger of telling 7 percent of the population they can't control what they do.
Natalie Johnson for the editorial board.
》 COMMENTARY
Shooter showed an indifference worse than hate
Shootings indicate tragic absence of belief and value
On Monday morning, Cho Seung-hui left his dorm room at Virginia Tech with two handguns and proceeded to brutally murder 32 people. He then committed suicide.
BY PATRICK LUIZ SULLIVAN
DE OLIVEIRA
KANSAN COLUMNIST
OPINION@KANSAN.COM
School shootings have happened before. Columbine and the University of Texas in 1966 are both well-known examples. What is troubling about school massacres similar to Virginia Tech is their apparent nihilism — their lack of adherence to any belief or value. When a student opens fire against his colleagues there is no struggle against authority attached, no idealistic answer in the stains of blood.
The tragedy of school massacres is that there is a loss of value in the lives of the victims and murderers alike. The victim's life loses value as soon as he or she is shot indiscriminately. As the bullets pierce through the victim's flesh, he or she is deprived of individual significance, becoming one in the mass of 32.
There is only the sickening feeling that nothing will ever be enough to comprehend that act. Every single person connected to the 33 killed will have to live with that feeling forever.
A crime of passion has an exquisite human element; there is some kind of connection between victim and assailant. But, in the case of school shootings there is no relationship, healthy or twisted, between the victims and the
shooter. Even hate, when directed at someone, recognizes that person's individuality, but Cho did not hate those 32 people as individuals. He was simply indifferent to them, something even sadder.
The murderer's life, as a part of humanity, lost its value long before he committed the atrocity. To engage in this kind of mindless destruction a person must first lose his or her sense of belonging - both to the community and to the overall human existence. That is why at the end the shooter turned the gun at himself.
People across the political spectrum will try to politicize this tragedy. Arguments for both stronger and more lenient gun control laws are already being made. However, these are not silver bullet solutions. Although school massacres are relatively rare, the phenomenon is almost exclusively American
- countries with both more liberal or stricter gun laws do not experience them in the same degree.
Gabriella Souza, editor
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Nicole Kelley, managing editor
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Ross Patrick, managing editor
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Courtney Hagen, opinion editor
Even if we were to classify these individuals as mentally ill, it still does not explain the geographic concentration of the tragedies. Perhaps it is the local sociological expression of a greater world trend of violence, which includes the high suicide rates in former Soviet states and the mindless violence perpetrated in large cities in Brazil.
There is always a search for meaning in the midst of a tragedy. What caused Cho Seung-hui to brutally murder these 32 individuals? The paradox when of these nihilistic actions is that they do not have a nihilistic origin in itself — something meaningful caused Cho to act as if nothing were meaningful. Something went incredibly wrong in his relationship with human beings; something that made the bond that intrinsically connects humans to each other — and forms the wonderful and diverse human race — break. Cho did not feel part of this patchwork.
Perhaps through this tragedy we can learn to value, celebrate and strengthen the connection we share with our fellow humans, and hope that by doing that we prevent further tragedies. That is all that is left: Hope.
Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira is a Belo Horizonte, Brazil, sophomore in journalism and history.
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