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Student Abstinence Sex Education
Fails
”When preaching flops,” by David Brooks, International
Herald Tribune, June 23-24,
2007, page 8
A little ago, a national study authorized by the U.S.
Congress found that abstinence education
programs don’t work. That gave liberals a chance to feel
superior because it turns out that
preaching traditional morality to students
doesn’t change behavior.
But in his realm, nobody has the right to feel smug. American
schools are awash in moral
instruction---on sex, multi-culturalism, environmental awareness,
and so on—and basically
none of it works.
Sex ed doesn’t change behavior. Birth control education
doesn’t produce measurable results.
The fact is, schools are ineffectual when it comes to
values education, including sex education.
You can put an adult in front of a
classroom or an assembly, and that adult can emit words,
but don’t expect much impact.
That’s because all this is based on a false model of human
nature. It’s based on the idea that
human beings are primarily deciders. If you pour them full of
moral maxims, they will be more
likely to decide properly when temptation
arises. If you pour them full of information about the
consequences of risky behavior,
they will decide to exercise prudence and forswear unwise
decisions.
That’s the way we’d like to think we are, but that’s not the
way we really are, and it’s
certainly not the way teenagers are. There is no central executive
zone in the brain where all
the information is gathered and decisions are made. There
is no little homunculus up there
watching reality on a screen and then deciding
how to proceed. In fact, the mind is a series of
parallel processes and loops,
bidding for urgency.
We’re not primarily deciders. We’re primarily perceivers. The
body receives huge amounts of
information from the world, and what we primarily do is turn
that data into a series of
generalizations, stereotypes, and theories that we can
use to navigate our way through life.
Once we’ve perceived a situation and
construed it so that it fits one of the patterns we carry in
our memory, we’ve pretty much
rigged how we’re going to react, even though we haven’t
consciously sat down to
make a decision. Construing is deciding.
A boy who grew up in a home where he was emotionally rejected
is going to perceive his
girlfriend differently than one who grew up in a happier
home, even though he might not be
able to tell you why or how.
Women who grow up in fatherless homes menstruate at an
earlier age than those who don’t,
and surely perceive their love affairs differently as well.
Women who live in neighborhoods with a shortage of men wear
more revealing clothing and
are in general more promiscuous than women in other
neighborhoods. They probably are not
conscious of how their behavior has changed, but
they’ve accurately construed their situation
(tougher competition for mates) and
altered their behavior accordingly.
When a teenage couple is in the backseat of a car about to
have sex or not, or unprotected
sex or not, they are not autonomous creatures making decisions
based on classroom maxims
or health risk reports.
Their behavior is shaped by the subconscious landscapes of
realty that have been implanted
since birth.
Did they grow up in homes where they felt emotionally secure?
Do they often feel socially
excluded? Did they grow up in a neighborhood where promiscuity is considered repulsive?
Did they grow up in a sex-drenched environment or an environment in which children are
buffered from it? (According to a New
Zealand study, firstborns are twice as likely to be
virgins at 21 than later-born
children.)
In other words, the teenagers in that car won’t really be
alone. They’ll be in there with a whole
web of attitudes from friends, family, and the world at
large. Some teenagers will derive from
those shared patterns a sense of subconscious
no-go zones. They’ll regard activities in that
no-go zone the way vegetarians
regard meat---as a taboo, beyond immediate possibility.
Deciding is conscious and individual, but perceiving is
subconscious and communal. The teen
sex programs that actually work don’t focus on the sex. They
focus on the environment teens
live in.
They work on the substratum perceptions students use to
orient themselves in the world. They
don’t try to lay down universal rules, but apply the
particular codes that have power in distinct
communities. They understand that changing
behavior changes attitudes, not the other way
around.
They understand that whether it’s in middle school or the
Middle East, getting human nature
right is really important. We’re perceivers first, not
deciders.
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