Educación sexual

Un temita candente en ciertos distritos de la Argentina también, la educación sexual en las escuelas de EEUU, “a liberal policy hijacked to serve conservative ende”:

Two weeks ago, Timken High School of Canton, Ohio made national headlines with the revelation that fully 13 percent of its female students were pregnant in 2005. The school offered only abstinence-based sex ed courses, and Columnist Dan Savage summed up the prevailing liberal sentiment in four words: "Good Work, American Taliban!"

But the 64 pregnancies were less interesting than the school's board's implicit acceptance of blame. The board decided that Canton schools would adopt sex-ed curriculums that promote contraception. That pregnancy rates were a function of a high school curriculum went unquestioned. Adolescent sex, apparently, indicates a policy failure, and public school parents have a grand total of two policy options: the comprehensive sex ed preferred by the left, or the abstinence-only version preferred by the right. Having the government teach coitus along with math and science has become so ingrained that the old conservative response to teaching sex in the classroom—don't—has dropped out of the conversation.

It wasn't always this way, as sociologist Kristin Luker explains in her new book, When Sex Goes to School, a study of America's tortured sex ed debate. Luker, a professor at the University if California, Berkley, has studied the evolution of sex ed for twenty years, following four American communities as the controversy developed. She stays remarkably objective about the whole business, but the story that emerges is that of a liberal policy hijacked to serve conservative ends. It's a fascinating look at big government conservatism ascendant.