- Position‹2 of 2
- Yes, sex education should be taught in schools
Many teenagers face enormous amounts of insecurity and anxiety surrounding sexuality, often leading to long term problems. This is largely caused by misinformation or lack of information about sex. Sex education could easily reduce this problem.
The argument
The argument treats sex education as a mental health intervention rather than as the delivery of information, and builds its case from the harm it claims to prevent. Sexual shame can generate inner-turmoil, anxiety, and stress. These are not confined to adolescence: this can have a profound effect on self-esteem and sexual satisfaction throughout adulthood, so a period of shame in youth is not something a person simply grows out of. The chain then runs from self-esteem to clinical outcomes. A lowered self-esteem is connected to psychological disorders like depression, paranoia, addiction, and sexual dissatisfaction, all serious issues which severely impact a person's quality of life. What links them in this account is a single underlying mechanism: a durable belief that something about oneself is shameful shapes how a person relates to others and to their own needs, and it does so across decades rather than in one episode. Against that, the intervention is described as acting on the cause rather than the symptoms. Sex education significantly reduces this sexual guilt and anxiety, and also leads to more tolerant sexual attitudes, ending the cycle of shame. The second effect matters as much as the first, because shame is sustained socially as well as privately: a cohort holding more tolerant attitudes generates less of the judgement out of which the next person's shame would form. The conclusion is drawn in the language of prevention. This indicates that sex education is a vital component of long-term mental health, and should therefore be taught in school as a preventative measure for serious long-term mental health problems. School is the setting named because it reaches everyone at the age when these attitudes take shape — before the shame described here has had the chance to settle and begin its downstream effects.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Feelings of guilt towards nonmarital sex, homosexuality, use of contraception, and masturbation is an important part of some religions. In fact, the Catholic church forbids all of the above. Teaching students not to feel shame about these things goes against their right to have a religious understanding of sexuality. Sexual guilt is the original contraceptive. Without it, society would collapse and unwanted pregnancy and STDs would be rampant.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The chain from shame to depression and addiction is asserted rather than traced. These are correlational associations with many shared causes, and the premise treats one contributing factor as a cause of specific psychiatric conditions. [Rejecting P2] 'Significantly reduces' is stated without a source, and the evidence that exists is about programme content and quality rather than about sex education as such — comprehensive and abstinence-focused programmes produce very different results, so the premise is too coarse to carry the conclusion. [Rejecting P3] The principle is broader than the argument needs. Schools cannot take on every preventative mental-health measure, and the objection most commonly raised concerns who sets the content — parents, faith communities or the state — which this argument does not address at all.