Department of Education officials say their new mandatory sex-ed lessons — which will be required for students as young as 11 — will stress abstinence as “the best way to avoid pregnancy” and STDs.
But as The Post’s Susan Edelman reported Sunday, workbooks for the courses suggest they’ll be less “here’s why not” and a lot more “here’s how.”
Those workbooks for DOE’s “recommended” curriculum refer teens to a Columbia University Web site where they can explore such topics as sado-masochism, bestiality, fetishes, sex toys and porn. It even offers such important lessons as how people wearing braces should perform oral sex.
And that’s just the start. Kids 11 and 12 will be taught to rate the relative safety of such practices as anal sex and mutual masturbation. High-school students will have to research the route from their school to the nearest clinic providing birth control and write down their confidentiality policy.
Come spring — when, as Tennyson wrote, “a young man’s fancy turns … to thoughts of love” — DOE will require one semester of sex ed in the sixth or seventh grades and another in ninth or 10th.
Parents can opt their kids out — but only from the classes on birth-control methods.
Which underscores what Princeton’s Robert P. George argued recently: “The idea of ‘value-free’ sex education was exploded as a myth long ago. The effect of such lessons is as much to promote a certain sexual ideology among the young as it is to protect their health.”
And promoting ideology — indoctrinating children in deeply personal matters, as George put it — violates parents’ rights.
It sets up an inherent potential conflict between what parents choose to teach their children and what the state teaches them — and is quite clear about whose advice they should follow.
Sure, kids can learn about most of this on the Web. But that hardly justifies forcing it on them in a curriculum.
Because there’s a big difference between giving kids information that can help them avoid bad decisions and inculcating them — at age 11 — in the joys of sex.
Chancellor Dennis Walcott needs to seriously rethink this misguided adventure.