Anna Quindlen essay about “Sex Ed” had many agreeable points. Like her it is understandable why she would want her kids to be taught about sex. What better place than a place they spend hours at daily. According to her she feel it could help prevent or prepare her kids when she says “ I’d like my sons to know as much as possible about how someone gets pregnant.” Which on one side she should be criticized for that, because it’s her job as a parent to provide that information for her children. Kids knowing just the basics of sex from their parents can go a long way.
In paragraph four she says “ I am not in the least convinced that the information alone will significantly alter the rate of teenage pregnancy.” Her claim is very agreeable, because teenage pregnancy continues to be an issue in America. Information means nothing if you don’t
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Teens should be able to feel comfortable saying they’re a virgin or not without being criticized. Which is one of the major problems that Anna
Quindlen tries to show her readers. In today's generation teens feel they have to have sex to accomplish something which is why as an country there are so many cases of teen pregnancy. Which goes back to Quindlen's claim that sex education is needed in schools.
As a parent you wouldn’t assume your child at age 16 is thinking about sex. If anything they are thinking about sports, school, and at that age just having a girlfriend. However, the world we live in now teens feel like having sex at a young age is the goal at life. A good example used by Quindlen talks about the girl telling her about her boyfriend who didn’t want to use condoms for his own benefit. Which goes to the point of why teens should have sex education classes, because at the age that teenage boys get to the point they can have sex they don’t understand the use of
How many girls have you see around school who are pregnant? Do you ever come to think that they may not have had the “sex talk” with their parents or any sort of sex education at school? “The United Stated still has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any industrialized country. About 40 percent of American women become pregnant before the age of 20. The result is about 1 million pregnancies each year among women ages 15 to 19.” (The Annie E. Casey Foundation) At the age 15-20 most teen males and females don’t have a stable job and are still going to school. There is much at risk when a male and female decide to have sexual intercourse. Having a sex education class would help decrease the teen pregnancy rate. Learning what one can do to prevent a teen pregnancy and the consequences that can lead up to it, will help reduce the amount of sexual activity among teens. Having a sex education class that is required will benefit the upcoming teens of the next generation. Some parents don’t want their teens to have premarital sex and some parents don’t want the schools to be the ones responsible to teach their kids about sex education because they feel like it’s their job. There has been much controversy on sex education being taught at school.
Anna Quindlen, author of “Sex Ed”, believes that sexual education is vital to America’s future due to the fact that teenage girls are getting pregnant. Children should have the tools they need in order to understand their own body and sexuality. Quindlen uses compare and contrast in order to differentiate between what sex culture was, and how it is in 1986. In “Sex Ed”, Quindlen speaks about her experience at a family planning clinic in one of the poorer neighborhoods of New York City. She uses strongly uses irony in the first part of the excerpt, stating how all of the teenagers perfectly understood the reproductive system, yet they were all pregnant. The answer to teenage pregnancy is sexual education; how someone gets pregnant, how someone avoids pregnancy and how to handle unplanned pregnancy. However, educating students about pregnancy and the reproductive system is not a magical solution
Today’s young Americans face strong peer pressure to be sexually active and engage themselves in risky behaviors (Merino 100-109). Anyone deciding to have sex must first think about all the risks involved. Kekla Magoon, author of Sex Education in Schools, says that “half of all teens aged 15 to 19 years old in the United States have had sex” (Magoon 64-65). It is currently not required by federal law for schools to teach Sex education and those few schools that do teach Sex education have the decision to determine how much information is allowed. Advocates from both sides of the Sex education debate agree that teens need positive influences in order to make practical decisions (Magoon 88-89). Opponents of Abstinence-only education believe it fails because it does not prepare teens for all the risks of sex (Magoon 64-65).
The article could potentially be considered outdated because it was posted roughly ten years ago. On the website, the author suggests individuals should have better access to birth control, the “morning-after” pill, and proper sex education that could drastically change the number of unintended pregnancies. If this were to happen, it could increase the knowledge of sex, pregnancies, and how to prevent it; however, making young adults more knowledgeable does not mean that we will lower the number of pregnancies
The “talk” about sex has never been a topic many like to discuss with tweens or teens, but it has to be addressed sometime during their lifetimes. Sex is a natural experience that is used for reproduction and the building of an emotional connection. However, many teens engage in pre-marital sex and have no knowledge about protecting themselves. Sex education teaches about human sexuality and how abstinence should be practiced to prevent sexual transmitted diseases (STDs) and unplanned pregnancies. Yet, sex education classes are mostly for those in college. Sex education is not meant to encourage sex, but hopefully steer students into having safe sex or no sex at all. Becoming aware about the consequences of having sex among the tween and teen community needs to be established and understood. If parents have a hard time giving the “talk” about sex, then the subject should be discussed with a trained individual instead of being avoided. Without knowledge teens will explore things without caution. Sources indicate that the argument to allow sex education within public schools, such as middle or high schools, is whether the benefits of learning about sex at an early age will outweigh the risks of experiencing sex without advanced knowledge.
In the U.S., more than 750,000 girls ages 15-19 become pregnant every year. More than 80 percent of these are unintended pregnancies. (Lorrie) Sex education and how it should be taught has been a controversial issue for many years. This is such a hot topic because everyone wants to find the best method to teach sex education so that children will be well informed and able to take care of their bodies and health. The need to teach children sex education will continue to be an ongoing issue and is not something that cannot be ignored. Educating students on sex education in school will ensure students are receiving correct accurate information.
Sex is a natural, healthy part of our lives and we have the right to a proper sex education in schools. Sex education in schools have been a controversial topic since 1912, which is when teachers began to be trained on how to teach sex education. The main debate today is whether the sex education should focus on abstinence-only programs or comprehensive programs. Abstinence-only programs focus on teaching students that the only socially acceptable time to have sex is during marriage and abstinence is the only way to protect yourself from contracting STD’s and from becoming pregnant. Comprehensive sex education focuses on reducing the spread of STD’s and teen pregnancies by giving you the facts and information of the different forms of contraceptives that are available. Although America’s various cultures have different views of sex education, it’s important to teach students proper sex education in schools because there is hardly any
In the past, sex was something that people tried to avoid talking about it, neither less teaching. Sex became a mystery, and a mystery would always trigger people’s nerves, especially teenager’s curious minds. That leads teenager at that time, who had no idea about sex, wanted to have sex to know about it. And when they had sex without any protection, they easily got STDs or HIV or even pregnancy. The case awakens society that sex education must be taught for students at the very first when they enter middle schools. But the way sex was taught those days was very much different from today. In the article “What the sex educators teach” posted on the Opposing View Point in Context website, Dana Mack has written about her experience when taking sex education class when she was a teen: “At the age of ten or eleven, girls and boys were herded into separate rooms - usually in the company of a parent. There, in industrial-gray pictures and solemn monotones, they were introduced to the world of gametes, ovaries, and menstruation. Not exactly titillating material, this reproductive information.” (Mack). Back in those days when sex was a newly revealed topic and sex education program had just been operated, people are still very shy to talk about sex and they often avoid having this kind of
From a young age, children are bombarded by images of the rich and the famous engaging in torrid public affairs or publicly discussing their increasingly active sex lives. No longer is sex education left to teachers and parents to explain, it is constantly in our faces at the forefront of our society. Regardless of sex education curriculums and debates about possible changes, children and teenagers are still learning everything they think there is to know about sex from very early on in their young lives. However, without responsible adults instructing them on the facts about sex, there are more likely to treat sex in a cavalier and offhanded fashion. According to Anna Quindlen’s essay Sex Ed, the responsibility of to education children about sex is evenly distributed between teachers and parents.
Sexual education has been a heated topic for years. The topic started in 1912 when the National Education Association wanted teachers to begin lecturing in sex ed programs.(Pardini, Priscilla) In 1940 the U.S. Public Health Service labeled sexual education an “urgent need” and strongly advocated it in schools.(Pardini, Priscilla) Though sexual education had support from health officials and educators, there were many opponents.(Pardini, Priscilla) Conservatives and health advisors battled over how sex ed benefits and how it should be taught in schools.(Pardini, Priscilla)
Having comprehensive sex education in the schools gives teens safe place to discuss these issues in fact it has been shown that. Seeing that some teens are shy about asking the important questions from their parents, and the parents themselves are not always comfortable or brave enough to answer these questions which can be harmful the child. Having this be taught at the schools wil...
For that reason, teen should be fully educated on the dos and don’ts when it comes to sex. Telling a youth that they should simply wait till marriage would intensify their curiosity about sex and push them to try it. Sex education is necessary for public schools; however, it should not be abstinence-only.
Aggleton shows teens the truth about sex instead of something seen as romantic and a risk, and they seeing themselves as people who are experimenting with new things. However, to others it is not a sign of romance but a risk that keeps haunting teenagers with AIDS and pregnancy. Even though young people are stereotyped as being more negative when it comes to the issue of sex, not all teenagers are that concerned with it. The author states more teenagers are looking at the outcome of having sex and thinking about the STD issue. Another issue is sex when it comes to parties and drugs. It seems that more and more girls are not getting the necessary understandings of the risks of sex, therefore having it at a younger age. While males are having sex for reasons just to try it out, or because they think they are cool. So the problem is teens are having sex for the wrong reasons without looking into the consequences.
The need for sex education is very questionable in today’s society. An article by Pamela DeCarlo, from the Centre for AIDS Prevention Studies, discusses why sex education is needed in schools. She asks why education on this subject is needed and if will help or hurt today’s children. Her view of the issue is that kids do need to have education to help to protect them but that it isn’t enough to prevent them from receiving STD’s and becoming pregnant. “Knowledge alone is not enough to change behaviors.” DeCarlo also says that, “Programs that rely mainly on conveying information about sex or moral precepts-how...
Before moving on, one must know that sex education is about, but not limited to the discussion of sexual intercourse. As a Buzzle article states, it involves a multitude of topics that introduce human sexual behaviors such as puberty, sexual health, sexual reproduction, sexuality, and more (Iyer). If formally received in school, these topics are brought up and discussed at age-appropriate times over the course of children’s junior high and high school education. Moreover, as I have introduced earlier, the way sex education should be taught is divided into two approaches. It is between taking either a conservative, abstinence-only approach or a more liberal, comprehensive approach. Abstinence-only education, approaches students by stressing the importance of “no sex before marriage” as be...