What if math was taught like health: Partisan delegation of public school education

I first had a “sex ed class” in 1982. I had a public school education in a liberal college town in Michigan where you got a “facts of life” unit in fifth grade and took a health class in junior high. Mr. Campbell, a stern middle-aged former athlete, sat down on his tall metal stool in front of our fifth grade at Bach Elementary and read out loud from a book that described sexual intercourse. I’d already checked out a detailed (age appropriate) book from the public library so I wasn’t hearing anything new, but I remember feeling like Mr. C didn’t look happy, reading “the penis goes into the vagina” to a room of giggling 10 year olds. But he did it in the same dry, exacting way he taught math and gave spelling tests. Because it was just facts. It appears that the ability to deliver no-nonsense sex education in Michigan public schools has declined in the last 30 years.

Alice Dreger sat in on her son’s “abstinence unit” at school last week. Her tweets in real time, profane, incredulous and satirical, went viral. Dreger is a professor of medical ethics and a writer focusing on medicine, science and social justice. Her son is a student in East Lansing public schools. Dreger calls East Lansing a “liberal college town.” (It is the home of Michigan State University. I grew up a couple of hours away, on the campus of the University of Michigan.) Dreger drew some criticism for her profanity and the coverage has thrown a spot light on abstinence based sex education.

Dreger summarized the class as fear mongering: “Here’s what these visiting ‘educators’ were telling those kids: Condoms fail. They fail so often, they are pointless. There is no birth control except condoms. So if you have sex, you will end up with a pregnancy, and there is no abortion — you have to have that baby. And you will be shamed.”

Michigan law requires the teaching of abstinence, but does not require teaching abstinence exclusively. In responding to the media attention the school explained that the “abstinence” unit is outsourced: the school brings a third party contractor to teach this unit specifically. According to the local coverage, this particular third party is an abstinence focused education group affiliated with an anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy center.” (I looked at the organization’s website and that appears to be correct, so choose not to drive traffic to the site).

Dreger also questioned the use of “guest speakers” to teach the class. It sounds like the sex educators were following in the steps of drug abuse prevention educators: bring in lay people to talk anecdotally about their sexual experiences. The problem with this approach in the context of abstinence is that consensual sex is not pathological, whereas drug abuse is. Unless you are going to bring in a sex positive speaker to talk about how they had great sex (one of Dreger’s tweets suggested doing just that), the alternative is to discuss sex as being an inherently dangerous and morally questionably choice. In East Lansing they teach that sex is not only unsafe and disastrous, but teach that “good girls” refuse sex and boys should learn that “good girls” are the ones that refuse sex.

In my junior high health class (in approximately 1984) we discussed the body parts and we got a bare bones technical explanation of the different types of birth control: condoms, pills, IUDs, diaphragms, spermicide, rhythm method, and abstinence. Each method had an “effectiveness percentage”. Abstinence was 100%. Because, “duh”. It was always in the chart as an option though. We also learned the names and symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases. We did not have anyone come in to talk about their experience having sex. (Nor did we learn about consent or sexual assault prevention). We did have recovering drug addicts come and talk about their experiences using drugs, including loss of jobs, criminal charges and broken relationships. And we had a guy come in who’d been in prison (not because of either drugs or sex).

The politicizing of sex education in this country has seemingly led to public schools delegating a portion of their health curriculum to lay people. Setting aside the fact that abstinence focused education doesn’t work particularly well in preventing pregnancy, this is just a bizarre pedagogical approach. Schools don’t take random people off the street and entrust them with parts of the math curriculum, so why should they do it for health class?

Why do you need a lay witness to talk about sex in order to educate young people? The fact that abstaining from intercourse is extremely effective at preventing STDs and pregnancy takes about three seconds to teach. It’s uncontroversial and true. Like “the penis goes in the vagina,” “no sperm anywhere near the vagina” means no pregnancy – at least at the basic cis-gender, heterosexual, mechanical default for middle school or high school health science. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services pamphlet on birth control summarizes “Continuous Abstinence” in two sentences, “This means not having sex (vaginal, anal, or oral) at any time. It is the only sure way to prevent pregnancy and protect against sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV.”

Mandating that schools “stress that abstinence from sex is a responsible and effective method of preventing unplanned or out-of-wedlock pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease and is a positive lifestyle for unmarried young people” forces educators to come up with an “abstinence unit”. The school has to develop sufficient content for a class that satisfies the moral message. In this case it meant bringing in people to talk about their sexual choices.

Even if a pro-sex view was an option, this would be like bringing in some random person off the street to teach geometry based on the idea that “well, I had use a t-square to cut and fit lumber once” and claim you have taught geometry. You teach geometry from a geometry text book because it’s basic set of facts, and there’s a right way to prove a theorem, or it doesn’t work. If at the end you think it would be cool to have an engineer or graphic designer come and talk about practical application, that’s icing on the cake. You don’t say “we have a t-square based curriculum” and abdicate your teaching to someone whose job is to sell t-squares. But the Michigan legislature has dictated teaching that sex is pathological (that’s all sex outside of heterosexual marriage, not just abusive, unprotected or addictive sex).

Judging from Dreger and her son’s experience, abstinence education also means teaching the Virgin/Whore dichotomy in public schools, so a regressive social agenda has replaced science. Despite the improvements in science and technology since the early 1980s (IUDs are a lot safer now than they were then) Michigan legislators choose to enforce a partisan moral agenda (the abstinence requirement is the only mandatory element of the sexual health curriculum). A weblog of reactions to Dreger’s tweets and the ensuing coverage included one commentator saying “Liberal parents like me, the mistake we make is thinking of ourselves as the kind of people who don’t interfere in public schools. As a consequence, the only people who do interfere with sex-ed curricula are the conservatives.” The time for the hands-off attitude is clearly over, if people want children and adolescents to learn the science of human reproduction unburdened by any other parents’ moral agenda.

Header image credit: Amplify