I stumbled on a couple recent pieces about the problems with today's sexual education. This one, "Kids Are Learning Sex from Porn" in Slate by Amanda Marcotte is brief but make a good point. This long New York Times Magazine piece Teaching Good Sex, by Lauire Abraham profiles a pleasure focused comprehensive program in a liberal Philadelphia private school.
I agree there is a problem but before we all push our schools to put in place programs like this, why not replace the porn with something better but use the same medium, the Internet to do it. The cost to create a program like the one in the Times piece for every kid in a public school would be huge and it would push away more time from academics and other subjects. I am sure there is a benefit in being able to ask questions and dialogue with teacher and peers about this stuff but all that is inherently problematic for so many reasons in a classroom setting. I am sure there are lots of good resources for sex positive, feminist, factually sex education information online and all the school would have to do would be to send some links to each kid and they would be done. Planned Parenthood, Midwest Teen Sex Show, Dan Savage, all provide good information and I am sure there are tons of other real, funny, good resources beyond porn.
I am generally not a fan of online eduation but this may be best way to teach this type of thing. If you wanted to get more elaboate, you could incorporate online expercizes, make the students write up paper on what they learned or something but even just sharing the information with everyone would go a long way. While I am sure many teens may google, "how to give a blow job" I am guessing they don't Google "comprehensive, progressive online sexual education resources for teens".
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