Time to rethink the sex education experiment

 Last week the National Party found themselves the target of some intense online vitriol from the progressive fringes after deputy leader Nicola Willis told a public meeting:

"Here’s how I feel about sexual education. That’s the job for me and my husband to do with our kids, based on our values and our views of the world... I want my education system focused on teaching my children how to read, how to write and how to do maths."

Any commonsense person knows that this is the most caring and rational approach to the question of sex education.

Despite the vitriol (much of it unabashed and venomous anti-religious bigotry), it seems that a much more pressing issue is worthy of our attention - the abject failure of the modern sex education experiment.

By almost every conceivable and meaningful measure for human flourishing, modern sex educators have failed, and, in some instances, to spectacular degrees.

Whether it’s STi rates, teen pregnancy, abortion rates, dysphoria social contagion, relationship stability and longevity, practical relationship skills, an authentic understanding of self-sacrificial love, active parental involvement in teaching children about sex and relationships, this experiment has not improved relational and sexual wellbeing in western society in any meaningful way, in fact, it has often taken us backwards.

One of the only ‘successes’ the modern sex education experiment can claim is that it has successfully replicated its failed program far and wide, and it has successfully spawned increasingly deviant versions of itself.

This latter fruit of modern sex education - the increasingly deviant ideological colonization of young children’s worldviews - is probably why certain people are so panicked right now by National’s inherently wise suggestion that sex education is best carried out under the watchful eye of caring parents.

They are afraid of losing their current unchecked power to shape the beliefs of young minds.

What makes the problem even worse, is that the promoters of this failed experiment are operating from an ideological paradigm which fails to recognize that they are not actually essential to human relationship or sexual success.

In our hyper-sexualised, mechanistic, technocratic culture, we have not only separated the sexual act from love and human relationships, but we have also fallen prey to the myth that sex is some sort of highly technical act that cannot be navigated without the aid of modern self-proclaimed experts in sex education.

I sometimes chuckle at the lofty notions many sex educators have about their 'special expertise' and the work they are engaged in.

I still remember sitting across from a paid sex education teacher, approximately 17 years ago, as she tried to insist in, a media debate, that HPV couldn't be transmitted by mere skin-to-skin contact from genital areas that condoms are incapable of covering.

She argued with great vehemence that I was wrong, until the public health nurse sitting on the couch next to me piped up and bluntly told her she was flat out wrong in her assertions, and that I was right, HPV could still be transmitted without intercourse, and condoms won't help in such scenarios.

This incident should serve as a sobering warning about the reliability of a lot of the sex education being touted by our so-called professional sex educators.

The truth is that, despite our best efforts to make it so, sex isn't actually rocket science.

For the overwhelming majority of our human history, we've managed to navigate it, and, until very recently, keep reproducing ourselves successfully, and without the current threat of widespread sexual disease.

It's quite something to consider that the very age which has become the most at risk from sexual disease, and the least capable of reproducing itself through the sexual act, is also the vary same age trying to claim for itself the mantle of being the most expert in the nature of human sexual affairs.

If a child is raised to prioritize and live virtue - not least of all the virtue of love - to seek the good of others, and to respect the inherent dignity of all others in all of their interactions with them, then, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the actual mechanics of the sexual act take care of themselves in a healthy way without the need for modern sex educators.

Any particularly modern risks, such as Internet porn or sexting, are best resolved by empowering parents with reliable knowledge and tools to address this in their own homes.

So, the question shouldn’t be: ‘should sex education be taught in our schools?’, rather, we should be asking: ‘why the heck are we still persisting with this redundant and failed approach instead of empowering parents to raise their kids for a life of more full and flourishing romantic relationships?’