Slate, from last week (missed it at the time) has a story (by Amanda Marcotte, of course) on a study done of a Planned Parenthood sex-ed curriculum which claims that, being realistic, you can’t persuade kids to wait until marriage for sex, so they won’t bother delaying at all, but that if you just tell them to wait until their late teens, they’ll understand and defer sex as desired.
Which all sounds reasonable enough. But the study itself is about preteens — about middle-schoolers! The study involved teaching one group this “defer sex” curriculum, and another group the “default” curriculum, and, “among students who received Get Real, 16% fewer boys and 15% fewer girls had sex compared to their peers who did not take Get Real.” With respect to boys in particular, “Boys who completed the Get Real take-home activities in 6th grade were more likely to delay sex [past] 8th grade than boys who did not complete these activities, highlighting the importance of parents and sons talking earlier and more frequently about sex.”
As usual, the article itself is behind a paywall; only the abstract is available, and all the content in the Slate article is right there in the abstract, so I can’t say for sure that Marcotte read the study itself and thought critically about it.
I mean, how many middle-schoolers are having sex? One hopes that the numbers are exceedingly small. I would never have imagined that the goal of a sex ed curriculum would be as modest as to convince middle-schoolers to wait until high school! And, of course, the summary as presented raises a couple questions: what was the curriculum for the control group? To what extend does the positive result for boys who completed the Get Real homework, really mean that the homework taught them to defer sex, vs. the fact that boys who do their homework are more likely to defer sex? (The same result is touted for both sexes: more Get Real homework completion = less sex.) And to what extent does this positive result, if it exists at all, last beyond middle school? (The curriculum itself extends from middle school to high school, and each grade’s table of contents seems to move from abstinence to merely “postponement” which itself nearly disappears in the high school, 9th grade, lesson plan. It sure seems that it’s entirely possible that the lesson students are learning is, “middle school = no sex, high school = now you’re ready!”)
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