Pregnancy rate, STD stats show sex ed in U.S. not working

Modern-day American teenagers are as connected — to the greater world and to each other — as any generation in history. But take a look at their sexual health and you'll start to wonder exactly how they're benefiting from all of those connections.

First the good news: Recent statistics from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) note that teen pregnancy rates have dropped. In 2013, they were at a record low of 26.5 per 1,000 women, down 10% from 2012.

But the CDC also notes that the U.S. teen pregnancy rate is substantially higher than in other industrialized nations. And the picture gets bleaker: of the 34% of teens who said they'd had sex in the previous three months, about four in 10 said they didn't use a condom in their last encounter.

It gets worse: Only about one in five "sexually experienced" teens have ever been tested for HIV. And nearly half of the 20 million new sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) contracted each year are among young people ages 15 to 24.

Most parents count on schools to teach kids about sex. So why is sex education in U.S. schools so ineffective?

It's probably because the topic pushes on nearly all of our fears about our children, historian Jonathan Zimmerman says. Are they naturally sexual beings? If so, what should we teach them about sex? What is the purpose of teaching them about something so intimate and so forbidden? Should the lessons aim to keep them sexually pure? Abstinent until marriage? Or to prevent disease? How about all of the above?

It turns out that Americans are not the only ones wrestling with these questions.

In his recent book Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education, Zimmerman finds that even politically liberal countries such as Sweden struggle to get it right. Parents there have long worried that sex education "might awake the sleeping bear" of sexual activity.

Interestingly, each country seems to have coined its own phrase, over the years, to demonstrate just how freaked out parents got over the years about such forbidden knowledge: In Japan, adults worried that it would "wake a sleeping child," while in Thailand the complaint was that it would "show nuts to the squirrel." In Vietnam, such courses would be like "showing the way to the deer."

In reaction, teachers in many countries moved to couch sex ed coursework in more parent-friendly terms: In the 1920s in Denmark, Zimmerman found, it was referred to as Mothercraft and Moral Education. In Germany, it was Marriage and Motherhood. Norwegians called it Family Hygiene.

Calls for family planning in the 1960s and 1970s turned the courses into Population Education; a decade later, the AIDS epidemic led teachers in many countries to reframe it as AIDS Education, Life Skills or simply Adolescence Education.

Zimmerman, a professor of history at New York University, maintains that no country in the past century or so has done much more than just offer sporadic sex education instruction. As a result, he says, any assertions that it has been effective — or, on the other hand, dangerous — are suspect.

"When you hear anyone on any side of the political spectrum in any country say, 'Sex ed is doing x behaviorally' — on the right it's making kids have more sex, or on the left it's making them use condoms — you can pretty much write them off as charlatans," he says.

What makes the U.S. pregnancy and STD statistics all the more astonishing, says Zimmerman, is that we as a nation really should have been able to put this sort of thing behind us in the 20th century, a stretch of history, he notes, that brought us two remarkable developments: near-universal school attendance and a near-complete revolution in sexual freedom and expression. Zimmerman goes so far as to call the last 100 years the Century of School and the Century of Sex.

Yet when you put them together, he says, "they just don't play nicely." We know more about sex, but it's "not because of school. School just hasn't been able to accommodate all of our differences and all of our tensions about this."

Amy Lang, a Seattle-based sexuality and parenting expert, says Zimmerman is absolutely right. "Sexuality is something that most people try to pretend is not an inherent part of being human," she says. Adults are "completely flustered by it" and wish it would go away. "As a culture and even as individuals, we don't want to embrace the fact that we're sexual creatures."

Part of our discomfort, she says, is because we don't want our kids to squirm while they're listening to matter-of-fact discussions about sexuality. "We buy into their discomfort."

The result, she says, is that teens get a lot of their information about sex by watching pornography. "They come into their sexual relationships thinking they already know how to do it. What's missing is that they don't have a fundamental understanding of sexuality — the social, cultural, emotional, inherent aspect of being human."

And short of a sudden change of heart, she says, we shouldn't count on our schools get the job done.

At the moment, only 22 states and the District of Columbia mandate sex education — and only 18 require that information on contraception be provided, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based research, policy analysis and education organization. Of the states that require some type of sex education, only 13 require that the instruction be "medically accurate," the institute found earlier this year. Just 33 states and D.C. mandate HIV education.

In a way, sex education suffers from the same difficulty as lessons on other fraught topics such as drugs or gangs or alcohol, Zimmerman says. Unlike with history, science or literature, the main purpose of lessons on sex and these other topics is to get students less interested in them. "In most of the other realms, the goal is to not just engage people's interests, but engage them in activity," Zimmerman says. "And in these zones, it's to make them less interested and less active."

Actually, Lang says, she doesn't worry about whether her lessons make the topic more attractive or less. She pushes to make them "as information-rich" as a good history class. "If kids are well-informed about something that's part of their health," she says, "they make better choices."