With about 9.5 million adolescents being diagnosed with sexually transmitted diseases (STD) each year, you would wonder what could be done to condense that number. A simple way to get the younger generation to avoid these diseases would be to well inform them of the risks put against themselves when not being safe. Teaching such knowledge also allows students to acknowledge the beauty of their body and learn how easy it can be to prevent long-term problems. Taking classes on sex education lets people to be more comfortable with sexual discussions and saying the words such as penis, vagina, and breast. Because sexual decisions can be crucial, accurate information is very helpful for adolescents. If school systems provided better sex education classes, then the young human population would be more precautious and informed about the human body, more comfortable dealing with sexual discussions, and assist making better sexual decisions. …show more content…
As stated before, 9.5 million adolescents contract a type of STD each year. Types of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are also not well recognized. For example, my brother who is twenty-three years old got an STI and he blames it on not being well aware of the dangers unprotected sex can bring. He complains about how easily he could have prevented what happened if he had been well informed. Luckily for my brother, it was not permanent and he was cured after several visits to the doctor. This is just one of many cases. For example, human papillomavirus, the most common STI in the United States; as evident in a study conducted at United High School in 2014, only 32 out of a 100 students are aware of the infection. This infection is also easily prevented with a vaccine, but students are unaware of this
When it comes to monitoring and ensuring the well being of school-aged children, the agendas of most our nation’s parents, teachers, and public education policy makers seem to be heavily focused on topics such as bullying, drug awareness, and social development. Although each of these issues is very important and deserving of the attention it receives, there is one topic-sex education in the public school system-that holds just as much relevance amongst today’s youth, and yet it continues to be denied the same consideration. With underage sex being one of the nation’s long lasting taboos, one would assume that effective Sex Ed programs in the public school system would be geared towards today’s youth. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case, especially for those residents of the state of Florida.
Since the HIV/AIDS epidemic began in the U.S. in the early 1980s the issue of sex education for American youth has had the attention of the nation. There are about 400,000 teen births every year in the U.S, with about 9 billion in associated public costs. STI contraction in general, as well as teen pregnancy, have put the subject even more so on the forefront of the nation’s leading issues. The approach and method for proper and effective sex education has been hotly debated. Some believe that teaching abstinence-only until marriage is the best method while others believe that a more comprehensive approach, which includes abstinence promotion as well as contraceptive information, is necessary. Abstinence-only program curriculums disregard medical ethics and scientific accuracy, and have been empirically proven to be ineffective; therefore, comprehensive sex education programs which are medically accurate, science-based and empirically proven should be the standard method of sex education for students/children in the U.S.
Did you know that there is no proof that condoms really reduce the risk of getting genital herpes? Many young adolescents don’t even understand what genital herpes really is or how you can get genital herpes. Young adolescents should know what the symptoms are if you get infected with a sexually transmitted disease such as genital herpes. Did you know that there is no cure for genital herpes and it is a life long disease? Treatments yet alone are way too expensive for young adolescents to afford. Someone needs to inform these adolescents about the risk they take when having sex because of their lack of responsibility while having sex.
Two drastic Emergency Room cases were handled in 1998 at Mary Washington Hospital. Concerned mothers brought their 12 year old daughters into the hospital thinking they were suffering from severe stomach pain or even appendicitis…both girls were actually in labor (Abstinence, 2002). The United States has the highest teen pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates in the Western world (Planned Parenthood, 2003). Are teens getting enough knowledge on sex and how to prevent STDs and unwanted pregnancies? Another heartbreaking statistic is that teenagers have the highest rate of STDs of any age group, with one in four young people contracting an STD by the age of 21 (Sex-Ed Work, 2003). Is sex education really working in school? Or do we need to change the type of curricula that is taught? There is no question that sex education should be taught in schools, but the question is how? The purpose of this paper is to determine which curricula of sex education should be taught in schools to be most effective in lowering STD and pregnancy rates among teenagers.
Students should be informed about more than just “don’t have sex” because eventually it is going to happen and they need to be educated on the proper way to handle the situations. Because students are mostly taught abstinence it has created the situation to where researchers find” Abstinence-only education, instead of reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, has made teenagers and young adults more vulnerable to ST...
Sex education in public schools has been a controversial issue in the United States for over a decade. With the HIV and teen pregnancy crises growing, sex education is needed.
Routine screening of all asymptomatic sexually active teens has been attempted but has not worked out. The reason is that the cost of such a screening program is prohibitively high and students and teenagers are often paranoid about their privacy and unwilling to participate (Llata et al, 2015). For over a decade, the rates of STDs in adolescents and teenagers have been rising in almost every city in the US. Thus, now researchers are asking two questions: 1) what is causing this rise in STDs? and 2) What can one do to counter it? In order to answer these two questions it is impor...
Not surprisingly the lack of useful sexual information is one of the reasons of the spreading sex related diseases. According to The American Social Health Association (1998) each year there are near ten million of new cases of sexually transmitted diseases among the teenage...
STDs have hugely increased in the United States. That should be taken seriously just like how people take young adults getting pregnant and criminal activates serious. The varying growth of different types of STDs, STD-related stigma, and prevention of STDs among young adults is a problem. Numerous young adults should take advantage of the free safe sex education class that schools offer to the students. STDs are a factor in this economy that everyone should look at and be careful about. Before doing any type of action, a young adult should consider their consequences from their actions.
In the United States, there is a rising problem that is not going anywhere anytime soon, that is if we, as citizens, don 't change it. This problem is causing billions of dollars and people 's futures all because schools would rather teach ignorance than the truth. What’s the problem? Sex education. Although sex education may not seem like a rising conflict, it is actually one of the top controversial topics in our country regarding education. According to Brigid McKeon, “Each year, U.S. teens experience as many as 850,000 pregnancies, and youth under age 25 experience about 9.1 million sexually transmitted infections (STIs)” (McKeon). This number is so unbelievable to any sane person, but somehow schools still won 't take the initiative to teach realistic sex education. Sex education can be taught in two different procedures- comprehensive or abstinence only. The difference between the two methods is that comprehensive sex education teaches abstinence as a secondary choice, so that teens who decide not to wait are well educated on how to keep themselves protected. Comprehensive sex education should be required in every single public school because it is the most effective method on how to keep teenagers well informed and prepared.
“Sex sells.” This is a common phrase used very often in social media and entertainment industries. Today, the youth generation is highly exposed to social media and products of entertainment industries from music to movies on the big screen. Most of the products produced by these industries are sexually explicit, and they tend to send the wrong messages about sexual behavior. Adolescents almost spend the same amount of time watching television and engaging with social media as they do in an educational environment. Therefore, the best way to tackle the misconceptions of sex among adolescents is to provide sex education in school. Sex education should be taught in school in order to provide a mutual learning experience for adolescents among
Sex ed. A phrase would make most middle schoolers cringe or giggle, and most high school students groan. Whether it was looking at diagrams of reproductive organs, reading about people who regret having sex before marriage, or watching slideshows with pictures of various genitals laden with disease, most sex education seemed disgusting and terrifying to students. Worst of all, much of it was incorrect. In reality, a shocking amount of sex education taught to students is misleading and untrue in many cases. This leads to problems such as STIs, STDs, and teen pregnancy which could possibly be avoided if students had been properly taught how to do so. After conducting a survey on anal sex experience among students in the rural Midwest, Dake et al. writes, “A study by Boekeloo and Howard found that 20% of adolescents did not believe that anal intercourse could transmit HIV” (Dake et al. 202). Misconceptions like these can end up causing health problems in students since they never had a chance to learn there was any physical danger caused by their actions.
Sex education in our schools has been a hot topic of debate for decades. The main point in question has been whether to utilize comprehensive sex education or abstinence-only curriculum to educate our youth. The popularity of abstinence-only curriculum over the last couple of decades has grown largely due to the United States government passing a law to give funding to states that teach the abstinence-only approach to sex education. But not teaching our children about sex and sexuality is not giving them the information they need to make well educated decisions. Sex education in our schools should teach more than just abstinence-only because these programs are not proven to prevent teens from having sex. Children need to be educated on how to prevent contracting sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies and be given the knowledge to understand the changes to their bodies during puberty. According to the Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten-12th Grade from the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), comprehensive sex education “should be appropriate to age, developmental level, and cultural background of students and respect the diversity of values and beliefs represented in the community” (SIECUS).
...tions and fifty percent of them were from young adults ages 15-24 (CDC). “Every year around nineteen million Americans get an STI infection and out of that nineteen million, nine million of them are young adults between the age 15 to 24” (STD Statistics). We want statistics like these to go down not stay the same or go up. They are not going to go down unless we do something about it. The more people getting viruses, the better chance our children are going to have sex with someone that has a virus and does not know it. There will be a domino effect passing viruses down from generation to generation if something does not change. It is a parent’s job to want the best for their children, education, health and knowing all about everything that can change their lives drastically. More sex education in schools could change the direction that people’s lives are heading.
According to World Association for Sexual Health, "to achieve sexual health, all individuals, including youth, must have access to comprehensive sexuality education and sexual health information and services throughout the life cycle" (Sexual Health for the Millennium 4). In the fifteenth century, scientists and educators raised the issue of sex education of children and adolescents. This topic particularly was discussed after the sexual revolution that occurred in the past century, when there were the first attempts to introduce sex education courses first as electives, and then as a mandatory class. Sex education should be taught in schools as a compulsory subject in order to develop knowledge about puberty as well as to prevent unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections.