New research suggests yet another reason why sex education should be taught in the classroom – because teens can learn from each other how to successfully use contraceptive methods.
Tag: sexual education
Promiscuity in US high schools is at a twenty year low and teen birth rates have fallen by over one third from 1991 through to 2009. So why is it if teens are sexually active at lower frequencies, and appear to be taking more precautions, that 50% of new STI infections last year were in people younger than 24?
A couple of years ago Steven Landsburg controversially argued that if we want STI rates to fall then what is needed is more people participating in casual sex. As counter-intuitive as that argument may seem, the reverse of that “unconventional wisdom” appears to be playing out in high schools across America.
A couple of years ago a published paper reported that girls who lost their virginity early were less likely to finish high school. The authors claimed that the only plausible explanation was that early debut into sexuality was psychologically harmful for girls and that this harm prevented these girls from graduating. This had to make the folks who wrote the US Federal guidelines for abstinence only education happy given that the requirement that students in an abstinence-only program be taught that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects” was woefully lacking in any scientific support.
