The Importance of Sex Educations in Schools

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). By age 18, 70 percent of U.S. females and 62 percent of U.S. males have initiated vaginal sex (Klein, 2005). Comprehensive/realistic sex education needs to be instilled in schools because it is effective at assisting young people to make healthy decisions about sex and to adopt healthy sexual behaviors and habits. Comprehensive/realistic sex education has a monumental effect on today’s youth, resulting in a rabid drop in teen pregnancies, teen abortion rates, and sexually transmitted infections between teens. Unlike abstinence until marriage programs that have not been shown to help teens delay the initiation of sex or to protect themselves when they do decide to participate in sexual encounters or activities. Yet, the U.S. government supports abstinence until programs within schools. Teenagers need to be accessible to accurate, realistic, and comprehensive sexual health information.
One of the most prominent arguments as to why realistic and comprehensive sexual education should not be taught within schools is because sexual education is something that is inappropriate for teens to be learning about and only promotes teen sex. But the side that many are not seeing is now a days realistically, “…some teenagers have begun sexualizing with each other as early as middle school. ( Albanesi 2010)” School is the place that people go to learn facts--science, math, English, etc. Sexual reproduction is a scientific fact, and some of the information about the actual process itself is not necessarily common knowledge to some parents. Why should we leave out the sexual aspect when tea...

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...ia, parents who either aren't comfortable or just simply refuse to discuss the topic, or our teens friends, then we have to be prepared for higher rates of pregnant teens, teens contracting STIs at earlier ages, uneducated teens spreading the steps they think one should take for sex as well as possible increases in pre-teen, and teen depression, followed by suicide rates, all of which can be linked to teens having sex before they are fully prepared and or have all the facts they need to be safe and prevent STIs and pregnancy. Comprehensive and realistic sexual education needs to be implemented within all school systems because it is the golden key that will guide teenagers in a safe direction to choosing to abstain from sex or to be smart about having sex by using contraceptives and condoms all resulting in less teen pregnancies and less teenagers contracting STI’s.