Last post from me ( I promise). The teachers from Florida may be accurate in their concerns-I am not there, and wish them luck. What the new legislation does tell me is that the Florida public has serious concerns and has lost trust in both its teachers and public schools, and that is something Florida teachers and unions should be trying very hard to address.
Teachers may not like it, but politicians don’t push for laws that a majority of their own voters won’t support. A substantial part of the Florida public must support this law. At a prior time, parents trusted teachers. Why many no longer do so should be a cause for concern.
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I think sex-ed can be safely removed from schools. Schools are abusing it.
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Politicians don’t push for laws that a majority of their own voters won’t support?
Like in Kansas, where the voters upheld the right to abortion and the state legislature keeps introducing anti-abortion bills?
Like in Texas, where 54% of voters oppose a total ban on abortion?
Or in Kentucky, where 53% of voters also oppose a total abortion ban?
I could go on but you get the idea.
Now, these are abortion numbers. But I think it’s literally impossible to poll on this particular issue because the underlying motive and supposed complaints are so ephemeral. There’s no concrete question to ask that this legislation actually addresses.
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Which is why segregation kept going for as long as it did in many places. Didn’t make it right to do though.
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And they send all of their students to school, right? Esp the kids from lower economic families that tend to have a poor start leading to lower scores in this country because they didn’t have the advantages other economic classes have?
In my travels to developing countries I’ve seen a lot of kids who would be in school in the US not in school there, often working (or begging).
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Banning sex-ed in failing public schools sounds pretty sensible to me.
The problem is that not every student has parents who talk to their kids about the “birds and the bees.” In some households, sex isn’t discussed at all. Some kids have parents who neglect them.
At my school we let a math teacher go. Why? Instead of teaching math (keep in mind these were honors and AP classes) this teacher was discussing religion in class. Parents complained and the teacher was told to stop taking about religion. They also offered him the option of teaching a religion class…
Well he didn’t stop talking about religion and was let go.
The problem wasn’t WHAT he was talking about, the problem was that he was talking about religion when he should’ve been teaching math…it was getting to the point where the whole class would be a discussion about religion and no math got taught.
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And things like that can be handled by schools. That’s where it should be handled, not by laws trying to make schools into places where robots should be teaching instead of people.
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I would equally dislike if the teacher try to influence religion beliefs or sexual preference. I am happy that I would not have any family members in school for the next six years and hope that all the madness we see now will stabilize after class action lawsuits of those who were influenced by media but later realized the health and mental implications of what they have done to themselves
When a single user opines 8 million times in 6 minutes that sex ed should be banned in schools, they’ve made their PoV clear. They can move on to other aspects of the thread.
Similarly, let’s move on from the debate of American schools failing vs international schools; we’ve had thread on that, and the discussion is really tangential to this thread.
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There is a concerted effort to erode trust in schools. It is an incredibly complex (and political) issue. Most people trust THEIR kids’ schools.
Most people do not support this legislation. Most just don’t think it will affect them, so they vote with different priorities. If it was a ballot initiative, it would fail.
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Yes, sex education could be in direct moral conflict with parents who want to become grandparents at age 36 or younger…
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There has always been the option for parents to opt their kids out of sex education that goes beyond the basics of the reproductive system. In my way too many years of teaching, there was a significant correlation between parents who opted out and kids who were already sexually active (in middle school).
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There probably needs to be some sort of retrospective study on sex education vs activity. My guess is that kids, whether there is sex ed or not will be sexually active. I am not sure that the classes really change behavior.
Probably not to any significant degree, but I would venture to say denying them information doesn’t prevent sexual behavior. My point was that the parents (and this is purely anecdotal) who were adamant that their kids not be given information tended to have kids who were already sexually active. And sometimes woefully misinformed about sex.
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They may not change behavior because hormones are strong. What they change is whether pregnancy is likely to happen or not. The more one knows about how to prevent it, the fewer unwanted pregnancies there are whether in school or as adults - hence why those who are against abortion should want more education.
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Teens are less likely to be sexually active today than in previous generations, and the rate of teen sex continues to decline. I don’t think there is a consensus about the reason for this trend, but it’s been going on for some time.
- IFS article (Sept 2020) with some graphs showing how teen sex rates have declined over time (especially for younger teens): Fewer American High Schoolers Having Sex Than Ever Before | Institute for Family Studies
- BBC article (Jan 2022) mentioning various studies: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/are-we-really-having-less-sex/
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… possibly because having experienced and partaken in open/public conversations about about sex, protection and prevention in the class room, reduces the hurdle for active teenagers to also broach the subject of protection/prevention individually with their teen partner!
It also takes the “mystery” out of it, and hands young girls arguments how to resist peer pressure that it’s some right of passage they have to try.
Without sex education, I would venture to guess, that active teenagers are more likely to see it as the taboo/too-young topic that they “sense” in their homes – with the higher outcome of unprotected sex.
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That might have been the case at one time, but now people with larger political aspirations pander to extremists. It’s the only way to get on to the national stage. You might also want to look into how gerrymandering has affected Florida’s state legislature. All pushed by DeSantis.
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I think we are actually reenacting a pattern in American politics/culture. Idealistic young people agitate for change, and more conservative people react negatively. I have sometimes have had a conservative reaction to activism, so I understand where the, “spoiled brats, why don’t they quiet down and behave respectfully” impulse comes from. But, when I take the long view, I realize how important and laudable student protests have been. Here are some examples:
During the 50s, students protested the anti-Communist book banning of McCarthyism, and stood up for their targeted professors. Hindsight showed that they were right to push back against McCarthy’s paranoia.
S24 and I recently visited the civil rights museum in Greensboro, NC where you can see the actual Woolworth’s lunch counter where four African American college students from NC A&T sat down at the segregated lunch counter on February 1st, 1960. They were not served, but remained peacefully sitting until closing. Then, they came back the next day, and the next. By February 5th, there were 300 students in Woolworths supporting the sit-in. Their efforts led to the desegregation of the Woolworth’s lunch counter, and sparked a nationwide sit-in movement. By April, 70,000 students were participating in lunch counter sit-ins in 78 cities. For more examples of students protesting segregation, you could look up the Freedom Riders. The backlash to this movement was severe. Thousands of students were arrested and worse.
College students also protested the in loco parentis doctrine for decades until the Supreme Court struck in down in 1961. During the Vietnam War, students protested ROTC and made progress in getting military recruitment off campus. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley formed in response to the university prohibiting advocacy of political causes, candidates, or speakers on campus. At Kent State four students were shot dead during a protest against Nixon’s expansion of the war in Vietnam to Cambodia. Many Americans blamed the students. The Vice President said that the students were like rotten apples and needed to be separated from decent society.
I grew up in the comparatively calm 70s and 80s, but when I went to look at colleges, some had shanty towns built on the quad to protest their university’s investments in South Africa. I distinctly remember them shouting, “Divest now!” It turned me off. I thought it was messy and loud. Rather than paying attention and learning something, I turned away and looked for a peaceful campus. That was fine, but now I know that those students succeeded in building a critical mass of people who forced universities to partially or fully divest, plus they raised awareness and pushed international condemnation of the situation in South Africa.
Another student movement that changed campus culture was the women’s safety movement—awareness of date rape, Take Back the Night, No Means No, etc. Women speaking up and protesting had a big role in the cultural shift that has happened towards consent. I have to admit that I was critical of some of these women on my campus because they were loud and disruptive, and I’m a mild-mannered introvert. But now, I see that they were brave, and often heroic. When I was in college, the general consensus was that stranger rape was the only kind of rape. Now, my daughters are more empowered, respected and assertive.
To me, it’s always worth trying to understand student protestors. They have been right a lot.
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