Sex Education Is Necessary Coursework

In the eighth grade, I attended a Catholic school event for students called Chastity Day.

A man stood at the center of a stage, microphone in hand, ready to speak about the sanctity of sex.

“You have to wait until marriage to have sex,” he said. “Any kind of sexual activity before marriage is a sin.”

Three or four people spoke after him, some told their own stories of finding the right person and finally sharing that precious gift of sex with each other, while others talked about how premarital sex was the gateway that led them to a horrible life, until that right person saved them.

The overall message was that premarital sex leads to nothing but trouble, and the only way to prevent that is to wait until marriage.

Even though we went through a whole day of being told not to have sex, I still had absolutely no idea what exactly sex was.

Sex is a natural and essential part of life. Talking about it should not be treated as a crime or seen as scandalous.

Like a majority of teenagers, we plan to learn through experience even though that may cause some serious consequences.

“Kids are having unprotected sex not knowing the consequences and end up suffering,” said Katherine Granados, 18, a criminal justice administration major at Wolfson Campus. “Most cases could be avoided if they knew better.”

Granados was lucky enough to have received both sex and abstinence education at North Miami High School in the health program.

According to the Health Research Funding, 41 percent of 18 and 19-year-old teens know little to nothing about contraceptives like condoms. Most teenagers know little to nothing about contraceptive pills.

National Survey of Family Growth also found that many sexually experienced teens—which is 46 percent of males and 33 percent of females—did not receive formal instruction on contraceptives before they had sex for the first time.

According to the website, I Wanna Know, which was made by the American Sexual Health Association to provide sexual health information to teens and parents, half of the new Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) occur in people ages 25 and younger.

They found that people from the ages of 15 to 25 have five times the reported rate of chlamydia, four times the rate of gonorrhea, and three times the rate of syphilis of the general population.

Abstinence-only education is not helping that number decrease.

An article on Think Progress revealed that states with inadequate sex education have the highest rates in teen pregnancy. Abstinence-only classes have also been found to be completely biased and only provide scientifically inaccurate facts just to scare teens into not having sex.

According to Advocates for Youth, teens enrolled in abstinence-only programs are no more likely to delay sexual initiation than teens that are not in the program.

I believe abstinence classes only leave more questions than answers.

“They made me more curious about sex,” said Daniel Camacho, 20, a Wolfson Campus psychology major and Catholic school graduate.

Camacho said he received most of his knowledge of sex from other students.

This is where accurate sex education saves the day.

National Survey of Family Growth found that 50 percent of teens between the ages of 15 to 19 who had formal sex education were less likely to become pregnant than those who received abstinence-only education. The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States also found that sex education delayed sexual activity in teens and increased the use of condoms.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, only 22 states require sex education in public schools and only 19 states require that the facts used in class be factual. Florida state policy requires that not only sex education to be optional, but that educators only teach abstinence, the importance of in-marriage-only sex and the negative outcomes of teen sex.

The sex talk can be a bit intimidating and awkward, but it has to be done.

As much as so many parents do not want their kids having sex at a young age, having a proper education about sex is doing them a favor. It should start off in either fourth or fifth grade, with talks about puberty, and then gradually go up from there.

Not everything about sex has to end up with sexually transmitted infections, teen pregnancies or living a horrible life.