Teaching Abstinence

I suppose the debate still rages on about how to deal with teen pregnancy and STD’s. One side says the only way to deal with it is to teach sex education, including birth control and to supply that birth control to those who ask for it. Their argument is that some teens will engage in premarital sex whether society condones it or not. The other side argues that if we teach these kids about sex and then give them birth control on demand, then it will only lead to more pregnancies and more problems. It is like giving teens a green light to engage in behavior that will have grave consequences on the rest of their lives. Schools should teach only abstinence, they argue. You wait until after you are married to have sex. Just say NO!

It struck me that what our schools should be about is teaching...responsibility and respectability. What if we taught our teens to be responsible human beings and good citizens in the world? What if we taught them, showed them the consequences of not being responsible for their lives? Teaching sex education and abstinence in exclusion or in isolation of the other has not worked and it will not work. Giving children knowledge without some sort of moral compass or value system to APPLY that knowledge is handicapping them. They are not getting the bigger picture on which to base their life decisions.

Today our schools are so focused on teaching math and science, often to the exclusion or minimization of things like music, history, art, geography and even civics. We teach teens how to take and pass multiple-choice tests, but not how to balance a check book or create a budget. How many teens today can name their state or US congressional representative or senator, or how a bill becomes law, or what the Bill of Rights mean? How can we expect our teens to become responsible, caring citizens, if we are not even teaching them the basics that will prepare them for life? We teach them things in isolation and forget about how these things relate to each other, how one thing relies upon the other and so on. We fail to relate actions to consequences. Too often, our schools just teach...subjects.

What if we taught parenting in every school? I know some schools have been innovative with programs that involve surrogate children in the form of dolls and even eggs. The students are paired off and for a certain amount of time, they have to take care of this “baby” and meet its every need 24 hours a day. By many accounts, it has been successful in making the teen “parents” realize that having a child in high school can really cramp their social life. It wears them out and yet does little to fill their need for someone to love them. But, what of those inner-city schools that do not have the funds for clever programs? They live in a world where it is normal to have children out of wedlock, raised by a single mother and an absent father. For too many teens, that is how the world works. Who is going to teach them any different? Who is going to teach them a bigger view of the world when that is all they know?

I know, I know, it is not the school’s job to teach parenting, morality or ethics, right? Shouldn’t that be the job of the parents? But perhaps it is time to try something different before another generation of kids is lost, set adrift, in a world that has no relevance, no moral compass...no vision. We have generations of parents now that have gotten lost themselves. They do not know how to parent. A single mom with several kids, working a bunch of jobs to make ends meet, fails at being a parent. A wealthy, dual career couple, absorbed by their corporate lives, fails at being parents. Their children grow up without roots, values or traditions because there is no one there to teach them about life, about responsibility and relationships. They are taught things in isolation that have no relationship to their world and their lives. They grow bored, drop out of school and join the growing number teens with no vision, no compass, no idea that a bigger world exists. They only know what they have been taught.

If we are going to teach abstinence, then let us teach our children to abstain from things that will limit them. Let us teach them to abstain from people who would turn them into hard, heartless beings that care little for anyone around them. Let us teach them to abstain from things that will crush their hopes and dreams. Let us teach them to abstain from things that block their vision of the world.

FOOD for THOUGHT...