Sex education creates a more inclusive environment

The argument

Proponents argue that sex education does more than convey information about bodies and risk: it tells students, by what it includes and what it leaves out, whose lives the school regards as ordinary. The evidence they point to is the scale of the problem and the size of the difference the curriculum makes. GLSEN's National School Climate Survey revealed that 63% of LGBTQ+ students feel unsafe in the school setting. In schools where LGBTQ+ relationships were included as part of sexual education instruction, fewer than half of LGBTQ+ students felt unsafe - a substantial reduction produced not by a security measure but by what was taught in a classroom. The mechanism proponents identify is stigma. A curriculum that treats only opposite-sex relationships as its subject matter implicitly marks LGBTQ+ students as outside the normal run of things, and that implication is part of what makes school unsafe for them, because hostility from peers has somewhere to attach. Teaching teens about LGBTQ+ relationships alongside others removes some of that negative stigma, since a relationship discussed in the same terms as everyone else's is harder to treat as deviant. Inclusion in the syllabus becomes inclusion in the school. Proponents add that the benefits extend beyond the LGBTQ+ community. Schools that teach a comprehensive sex education programme - one including same-sex relationships and consent - have lower suicide rates, lower rates of depression, lower rates of sexual assault and reduced anxiety among their students generally. Instruction in consent in particular works on the conduct of the whole student body rather than on any one group within it. An education that names the full range of relationships students will actually have, and sets out what respect within them requires, makes the school safer for everyone in it. For this reason, a comprehensive sexual education programme should be taught in schools.

Context

In schools where LGBTQ+ matters were taught as part of the sexual education curriculum, Homosexual, lesbian and transgender students feel safer at school and more broadly students attending the school report feeling safer.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents argue the survey findings are correlational: schools that adopt LGBTQ+-inclusive curricula may already be more accepting for other reasons, so the lower rate of students feeling unsafe cannot be attributed to the curriculum itself. The same confounding applies to the cited links with suicide, assault and depression, which compare very different schools and populations. They add a separate objection that curriculum content — especially on sexuality — is properly a matter for parents and communities, and that a worthy aim like inclusivity does not by itself settle what belongs in a school syllabus or at what age. Establishing a benefit is not the same as establishing that schools are the right venue.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The 63%-versus-under-half comparison is correlational; schools that adopt inclusive curricula may already be more accepting, so the causal claim is unproven. [Rejecting P3] The associations with lower suicide, assault and depression span differing schools and populations and are vulnerable to confounding, so they are not demonstrated effects of the curriculum alone.