That's insane. Sex Ed is very important, just not in the sense of "the man puts his penis in the woman's vagina", but in the sense of "if something happens other things may arise". For example, sex means reproduction and reproduction means kids. If we let children to grow up by themselves and not give them any kind of information, they will have doubts, since children tend to be very curious; they will try to experiment, but that's not always good for obvious reasons.
I think we should give them as many information as we can early on, if not, it can become difficult afterwards.

Fair point, I forgot birth control. I agree that should be taught,

I wish they were diagrams, they were real photographs, well slides of diseased genitals.

I did not say that there was no need for sex ed. I said there was no need from a perspective of teaching us how to do it. I also said (or implied) that safe sex was an important focus. It's the rest that gets me.

As pointed out by another contributor, Birth control, I totally missed, and is important.

I misinterpreted your post then, sorry for that

"Today, kids, we're going to talk about boobs and dicks and of all the frustrations and shenanigans that follow."

I think kids really need to know about STDs - it's a health and safety issue in case parents are too shy to bring up the birds and bees to their children.

Sex Ed is worthless to teach to students because most of them are going to take information about sex from their friends and television more seriously. Last time I was in sex ed, some girl thought if she took out a guy's shaft before he 'came' it would prevent pregnancy. She was wrong 9 months later. Sorry if I grossed you guys out. ;)

I fail to see the point of Sex Ed, frankly.

It's never been part of the school curriculum in France, and yet we have a lower than average teenage pregnancy rate.
You don't need a whole course to say "wear a condom" which is basically what sex ed amounts to. The rest is up to the student and his parents imho.

As for students coming from very conservative households, I don't think a few hours of having a teacher harping at a teenager on the subject is going to make up for years of parents telling him sex is evil.

There's a lot more to it than just how to use a condom. Granted there are cultural reasons why we need it more in the US than you probably do in France, but there's definitely more than just how to use protection.

It's the class where they typically talk about the changes that typically happen during puberty and the mechanics of how various things work.

But, it tends to be limited in that it doesn't talk at all about things of significance to people who aren't straight. The vagina has precisely zero relevance for gay men, and even for lesbians the information isn't particularly pertinent.

I don't quite understand why sex ed should talk about anything other than how to prevent pregnancy and STDs (which basically boils down to "use a condom").

History shows that people really don't need to be taught how to have sex. They can definitely figure it out on their own.
Even if they couldn't, I don't think it's a school's role to teach it. The information's readily available, someone who's interested will find it.

As for the changes from puberty, the vast majority of teenagers manage to get by without anyone but their parents guiding them through it. The ones who can't probably have more serious problems than can be solved in a few hours by unqualified people.

There's a lot more to human sexuality than just having sex. Trust me, even in the US we can figure that out without education.

Yes, the information is out there, but history has pretty clearly demonstrated that it's not accurate and a lot of it is harmful. It might be different in French language resources, but the English language ones are highly varied in terms of accuracy and intent.

Sex Ed is amongst other things a chance to ask questions that we can't normally ask and to hopeful debunk some of the rather strange myths that circulate. A lot of women seem to believe that men can't have an erection unless they're interested in sex or that men think about sex every several seconds. Neither of which is true. Some folks believe that eating green M&Ms will cause a man's penis to shrink.

Perhaps it's not a problem in France, but in the US it is a serious problem, and we've tried the no or limited Sex Ed approach over the last few years, and by pretty much every measure it's been an abysmal failure, far worse than what we had been doing.

Obviously there's a lot of inaccurate information around, but I question your assumption that teenagers would rather believe what they hear from teachers in Sex Ed than the myths they've heard before.
I doubt most teachers have a lot of qualifications when it comes to the subject, not to mention the fact that most kids would rather not think about their teacher having sex in the first place and so he or she would have low credibility in most cases.

Maybe not having sex ed lead to serious problems in the US but I'm not sure having it would do much to alleviate them when it's obvious that they mostly stem from cultural issues. I therefore question whether it's a lack of Sex Ed or an increasingly conservative outlook from parents that led to the failures you're talking about.
A few hours in school won't do much to change a kid 's outlook on sexuality when he's been told for years that it was evil.

I have had unqualified math teachers; does that invalidate the subject? The answer is no. Despite the "out to lunchyness" of some educators and administrators, sex ed is an important subject.


I wanted to have sex with a lot of my teachers. I don't know what ugly school you attended.

From that perspective, is it sex education or life education? Maybe those "other things" need to be discussed a bit as a long-term consequence. Okay, you could get the disease shown in this nasty picture, but do you kids realize that you're going to deal with this for the rest of your life? Do you understand that pregnancy is 9 months and raising a kid is something you work for at least the next 18 years? The lessons of Consequence, in general, are a bit lacking in education and child-rearing.

I'm a bit torn on the whole thing and really don't know which way to go. On one hand, it's a good idea that kids have at least rudimentary knowledge of birth control and disease prevention. On the other, I understand that many parents want to keep this at home, where their own private viewpoints can be used to shape the kids' behavior in this regard.

But we get a couple problems from both methods. Schools may be teaching things far beyond basic sexual safety and pregnancy prevention, and may be contradicting the desires of the parents (not saying one is more right than the other). Parents, though, may not be teaching correct information or may be skipping out on the entire discussion which leaves kids up to figure it out on their own, with predictably bad results.

In a perfect world, this would be handled with schools and parents working together, both covering the necessary basics while allowing each family to have its own private discussion.

From the cultural dimension sex issues can be tough here in the States, especially for pre-adults. Hell, even for adults. At the same time we're told it's dirty or taboo and should be avoided, but it's also shoved in our faces through various media. No small wonder that kids try to find out on their own. Sadly, somewhere in all of that, we lose the message that love, or at least friendship, makes for a better foundation for sexual happiness and we instead turn it into a sort of biological act of momentary pleasure.