Sex Education

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"What's down there" might be a personal subject, but it's a fact of life. Everyone has sex organs and everyone will use them barring early death. Eleven is hardly too young for sex ed; that's when most kids start hitting puberty. Obviously kids that young don't need gratuitous explanations, but they do need to know what's up with their bodies.

I think I agree half way with that. I guess eleven is a good age. It's just that I think that school isn't the right place to learn about it. Like I said, it's a very personal subject.

Hannah!:

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"What's down there" might be a personal subject, but it's a fact of life. Everyone has sex organs and everyone will use them barring early death. Eleven is hardly too young for sex ed; that's when most kids start hitting puberty. Obviously kids that young don't need gratuitous explanations, but they do need to know what's up with their bodies.

I think I agree half way with that. I guess eleven is a good age. It's just that I think that school isn't the right place to learn about it. Like I said, it's a very personal subject.

School is a place that teaches education.
What better place to be educated than an institute of education?

well whether the schools teach it or not kids are still going to find out, but if they teach safe-sex then kids might get it that they need protection or they have about 89% more chance of getting pregnant. also what the school doesn't teach they could go on the internet and find out or whatever, so really you're not going to protect them for to long

I think you should be taught as soon as you start schooling, but don't throw the kids right in the deep end. Start off with the basics, then as they get older, progress, and get a bit into more detail. Like when you're 4/5, tell kids the proper sex organ names, and teach them why we reproduce, etc, etc. Then at 6/7, explain how humans reproduce, etc, etc.

^ thats a good idea, but maybe we shouldn't tell them the names at such a young age.

^ true but do you want four-year-olds running around screaming "vagina! and penis!" it's bad enough if they learn stupid or something they run around saying it all the time

^ good piont. but if it gets a reaction out of someone then they might do it for attention, thats what my siblings did they screamed out "farts" and "stupid" all the time and got attention so they continued

I agree with savedbymcr_2004. They are way too young to be even thinking about sex. If people keep exposing sex edu at such a young age, (4-10) they will get too curious and think, "why the hell are they teaching us this?" Children don't think about it until puberty happens. I think the right time for sex edu to be taught is at the beginning of high school (year 7) because most young people reach puberty at that time and therefore it is the right time to know what the hell is happening with their bodies.

^ i think about fith grade is when you say part and then the rest in seventh, because the avrage age for inner city kids to lose thier virginity at is about 11.7 (eleven years and seven months) in most states you can get a condom by age 12.

^ i agree, that way they get kind of an idea and can move along

yes, i think that kids in maybe 3rd grade(or age 8/9) should learn the proper names and when they're 11 talk about it in a more serious dicussion, something like that.

i think contraception should be taught at about 11/12, maybe 12/13, seeing as how some kids in my school are sexual active at that age

I taught 5th grade, 10-11 yr olds, and that's when they got "the talk." Yes, they're ab bit immature, but they understand everything. Plus, not all parents discuss this w/their kids. The changes that occur in adolescence can be really scary & confusing if you are kept ignorant. Therefore, I feel sex education is very important.

heh, the health nurse came to our school a week or so ago to talk to us about birth control and stuff and she got spermicide Everywhere it was pretty funny.

^our health teacher had it all condoms(both boy and girl) gels, even a diaphram. it was funny though, she was teaching us were the f word came from. now everytime we say it or hear it she wants us to think,"Fornication Under Concent of King."

^ That acronym's actually an urban legend, same as the acronym for the 's' word ('ship high in transit').

Kids in Australian schools don't get handed condoms as part of sex ed, the teacher brings a banana and a condom to do a demonstration for the class but I personally never witnessed this demo - our class was always too busy asking questions or focusing on other things and the lesson would be over before we got to that stage.
I don't know if handing out condoms is the best idea, I mean would teachers hand out prescriptions for the Pill? Besides, any kid who wants to have access to condoms can either purchase them from a supermarket or pharmacy with no questions asked (they just have to deal with the 'embarrassment' of handing them over to the checkout chick), or they can be easily obtained from vending machines in public toilets - a group of friends and I bought our first condoms from a vending machine on a school trip when we were 14 (and yeah, they got blown up like balloons and thrown around the bus on the way home, much to the dismay of the teachers).

I personally think there's not enough actual SEX education in schools - the public school I attended (which has the same lesson plan for sex ed as every other public school in the state, maybe the country) focused almost entirely on STD's and how to avoid them, and basically told us that 'you can prevent pregnancy by using a condom, the Pill or other forms of contraception, if you have unprotected sex you'll either get AIDS or pregnant'. I think that the class should focus not only on the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and STD's, but also deal with things like peer pressure, relationship issues and the risk factors involved with the use of drugs and alcohol - especially now that drink-spiking is becoming almost epidemic in Australia. With regards to the drink-spiking issue, it's assumed that only adults over the age of 18, who go to pubs and nightclubs are at risk, therefore kids in schools aren't taught about the dangers. And not only do I know of plenty of underage kids (mostly girls who get past bouncers by dressing themselves up) who sneak into clubs and expose themselves to such risks, but I have heard of incidents where people at house parties (whether they be invited guests - guys in school - or gatecrashers - older guys) have spiked people's drinks either with drugs or extra alcohol, and the consequences have been dire.

Not only that, but there's the fact that almost everybody knows 'penis + vagina - protection = pregnancy' by the time they're 12 or 13 (many people know this at a much younger age, I don't deny that), so teaching 15 - 17-year-olds is pretty useless. Perhaps sex ed classes could feature lessons on the value of sex within a relationship as opposed to giving some random a blowjob at a party because you're drunk; maybe they could focus some attention on how hard it is to be a teen parent rather than just saying 'wear a condom and you won't have to worry about it'. Maybe spend some time teaching the class that using sex to get something from someone, or as a substitute for something, is a symptom of a more serious issue and should be addressed (for instance, a girl using sex to stop her boyfriend from dumping her, or a girl sleeping around because she feels worthless and thinks that the more she has sex, the more people will like her).

I definitely believe that schools should be teaching sex ed, and a lot of it for that matter, because while it's all well and good to say that educating your child about that side of life is a parent's responsibility, there are very, very few who will take the initiative or have the courage to sit down and have that talk with their kids. I mean, my parents are pretty open-minded and quite modern etc, but the extent of the 'talk' I got from my mother was, 'You don't do it until you're married, it's that simple,' and dad said absolutely nothing. So I don't care what parents/other people say about 'it's not a teacher's job to tell students about the delicate ins-and-outs of such behaviour' - I think the schools should definitely teach kids sex ed, because you can almost guarantee that their parents aren't going to do it, or if they do, their information might be outdated/incorrect and therefore pointless. I don't know anybody who has had 'the talk' from their parents - everyone I know learned it in schools, from books, from friends, or by finding out for themselves; and the ones who did get to discuss it with their parents either got told, 'You're too young,' 'Wait until you're married,' or some outlandish advice that was so outdated and useless that the kid would have been better off going to the library and researching it themselves (for example, this girl I went to school with whose mother had in all seriousness told her that getting fingered would make her pregnant - I'm serious, the mother actually believed this).