The Influence Of Sexual Education

In America’s current hypersexualized society, sex is all around us. We see it in music, movies, and even on primetime television. The most vulnerable demographic to this flood of sexuality is the American youth. Growing up in the information age, adolescents have access to content that their parents could never have even dreamed of. Access to pornography is now just as simple as typing four letters into a search engine, and with this ease of access comes access to misleading information and views on sexual health and what is considered normal in sexual relations. Many are at a loss for how to combat the spreading of dangerous information to America’s most impressionable age group, and it leads to the question, is sexual education a topic that …show more content…
In a classroom setting, it is exponentially harder to talk to teens and preteens about the ins and outs of sex. Cutting eyes at their friends and dismissing lectures and PowerPoint presentations demonstrating the proper way to put a condom on a banana makes it hard to teach anyone (Teitel). Trying to speak to adolescents about sex in a classroom setting is always hard, as it’s embarrassing to listen to a teacher drone on about sex. It’s even harder to talk to a teacher about sex, as it is such a private subject, it really only makes students cringe and keep questions to themselves to avoid being embarrassed in front of their peers (Teitel). Sex education is often met with difficulties in the curriculum, as it is often taught as a brief interlude in a health class, the information provided is usually lacking (Parker). Sex education classes are dismissed by students who see it as a recreational course full of information they’re already “experts” in (Parker). Kids are disadvantaged in their education as today’s sexual education because many important topics “are not covered in their most recent sexuality education course, or that they are not covered in sufficient depth” (Dailard) and the “curriculum predates…every piece of technology you use on a daily basis” (Teitel). In addition to outdated information, there lies an issue in training teachers to teach a course on sex education. Having a teacher already on staff to teach a course or a segment of a course on sex is not good enough, students would benefit much more from the schools bringing in a person “trained to know how to talk about it, deal with diverse cultures [and] manage all the overt silliness that accompanies such a tricky, delicate, complex area” (Cosslett). If not handled correctly, teaching a class on sexual education can be next to impossible, as it’s hard to control a class if everyone’s