DATE: Saturday, July 26, 1997               TAG: 9707260010

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: BY WALLY COX 

                                            LENGTH:   75 lines

THE SHAME OF SEX EDUCATION

In the Victorian era, the mere utterance of the phrase ``sex education'' was cause for embarrassment. Our contemporary society has become so liberated that neither the public activity of ``sex education'' nor a revelation of its scandalous nature is seemingly capable of arousing such emotion. We've come a long way, baby. In fact, we've come too far.

Perhaps more than any other education controversy, the matter of family life education typifies and highlights the problematic nature of public education. The inherent moral dilemma regarding appropriateness of instructional content and of whether nonfamily members (strangers pretty much) should be teaching family intimacies to other people's children obscures the real moral dilemma - that of whether each parent should be able to control the content of any and all instruction received by his or her child. The fact that the general public is unable or unwilling to discern the primary dilemma is itself a shame.

The dilemma evolved over time as parents gradually relinquished all educational decision-making authority to those who taught their children. Nowadays, many parents (others also) unquestioningly accept the operative assumption that sending a child to school goes hand in hand with relinquishing educational authority. Shame on parents for this irresponsibility!

Some parents now want back that portion of responsibility necessary to control the curriculum content of family life education because of their dissatisfaction with it. But educators are not amenable to giving back this parental right because they believe either that parents are truly irresponsible when it comes to providing sex education and/or that parents are not even supposed to have this right.

Regarding the first concern, neglect of a right is not automatic grounds for taking it from the negligent and most certainly not from those who are responsible. But deed done, teachers contractually answer to the state, not the parents. Rather than engage in this shameful takeover of parental rights, parental neglect to determine educational content more logically calls for public education to equip students and parents alike for responsible parenting. We might even wonder how it is that parents came to believe that public education should have rights over them and why parents aren't urged, even educated, to reclaim and to responsibly exercise their natural rights.

Regarding the second concern, civil government does little if anything to protect and promote parental rights/responsibilities in education. This country was and still is the leading advocate of the proposition that government is instituted to guarantee to its citizens, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, their unalienable rights, which naturally include parental rights. Yet in the area of public education, parental involvement (trivial as compared to parental control) comes as a favor granted rather than a right protected. Instead of being a government of, by and for the people, it is, in effect, of, by and for the government via the education establishment. Further, parents who fail to responsibly guide the education of their children are perversely rewarded by government policy in two different ways. First, others are taxed, even involuntarily, to pay for remedial education for irresponsibly raised children. Second, educationally irresponsible parents are set free from the responsibility of having to make any future decisions about educational content, as in sex education. Shame on government for this irresponsibility!

Last, and tragically, most of this shame is not properly acknowledged but instead is displaced onto the children. The irresponsibility of their various authority figures - parents, educators, government officials - begets shameful consequences, such as a loss of morality, that youth shamelessly experience. And so the scandalous cycle continues!

The dilemma regarding whether to permit sex education in public schools is a subset of the more important question of whether parents should be allowed to control educational content taught to their children. The answer of ``yes'' to parental control implies that public schools should graduate educationally and not just sexually responsible adults. With the full and responsible restoration of parental rights in education, we will also have the solution to all the subsidiary issues that make parents and the education establishment foes instead of friends. Until then, shame on us all! MEMO: Wally Cox is professor of education at Regent University.

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