High School Sexual Education

My high school did not really do much for sexual education. There was an optional health class that was offered, but there were never enough people that wanted to take it so most of the time, they did not have the class. In both biology and anatomy, there was one day that nurses from the local hospital would come in and talk about STDs but that was the only time in high school. Although I think that teaching high schoolers about STDs is important, these talks seem to attempt to scare teens into not having sex. In eighth grade, there is a mandatory health class where they teach about sexual education and STDs. This class was an abstinence-only program and was very insistent that being abstinent was the only way to be. It was also a joke at my

Between classes, all of the students would joke about what they had just been taught and laugh about how funny it was to talk about sex. This was partially because we were immature thirteen-year-olds but also because we were taught that sex is bad until you are married and that it should not happen until you are older than high school or college. Knowing what I know now about sexuality, I would change how my high school teaches sexual education. First of all, I would more than likely require some sexual education course in one year of high school. Teens get their information about sex from peers and today, the internet, and neither of these sources are very reliable (Letcher, 2018). Nothing is going to stop teens from having sex, it is a natural part of life, but many teens have sex without really knowing much about it, or the risks of it, including STDs and pregnancy. Also, I would make sexual education classes not abstinence-only but educate teens on having sex and the results of it. Abstinence-only