By Debbie Garratt, Real Choices Australia
Used with permission.
We have had unprecedented interest in our secondary school’s program Choices Decisions Outcomes … thanks mostly to the program itself, but at least in part to the latest media contribution by Leslie Cannold. I am confident, however this wasn’t her intent. The aspects of our program that Ms Cannold appears to find so disturbing, are precisely the aspects that parents are telling us they want for their children. They want their children to understand their value and worth, to have self respect and to understand sexuality as an important and valuable aspect of themselves, not simply a ‘recreational’ activity.
Far from teaching young people that peer pressure causes teen sex, as Cannold suggests, our program teaches young people that, as with any other activity they may not want to participate in, that they can develop strategies for saying ‘no’. The fact is that the majority of Year 10 students are still virgins, yet the sex education most of them get is what one young student described as ‘totally humiliating’. At an age where she already felt bombarded by messages that ‘everyone is ‘doing it’’, she was coerced into demonstrating the application of a condom on a phallic object in a classroom. She rightly asks, ‘where was the education for me… and most of my friends, who don’t want to have sex, or handle a condom?’.
Sex is not just about physiology, it is also about relationship, and about our emotional selves. Teaching the physiology of sex in the absence of a relationship context, and in the absence of also teaching about possible consequences, is both irresponsible and dishonest.
Our program does not push a particular view on young people. What it does is encourage young people to be critical thinkers, to think ahead to the consequences of their actions, and these consequences do include the possibility of pregnancy and of sexually transmitted infections, some of which are lifelong diseases, not just a short lived ‘love bug’.
It seems to me that rather than be so critical of a program which values the integrity and intelligence of young people to develop responsible decision making abilities, Cannold might question the motives behind the world’s most prolific abortion providers teaching our kids that they can just ‘do it’ because it ‘… can be rewarding and enjoyable..’ and that they can do it ‘safely’. All education has a values base… I guess it’s a matter of deciding which values we want to be driving the education of our kids.
The secondary school education program Choices, Decisions, Outcomes, is an innovative value based education program encouraging adolescents to make healthy lifestyle choices regarding their sexuality.
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