This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Ignorance is not a Utah value.
At least it shouldn't be. But every time anyone tries to discuss sex education in this state, influential people step up to claim that there basically shouldn't be any such thing because it will lead our tender youth astray.
The most recent example of this autonomic stimulus and response (that will be on the test) was heard at Friday's meeting of the Utah State Board of Education.
Board members dutifully took up the matter of the regular update of the state's curriculum for health education and, just as dutifully, two of the members objected to any change in the current approach, something called an "abstinence-plus" curriculum. That's the version that allows some talk of contraception and reproduction, but stresses abstinence as the most effective way to prevent pregnancy and disease.
Which, of course, it is. Until it isn't.
Until healthy young people with healthy species-preserving urges lose themselves in a moment that they were unequipped to avoid, or to minimize risk of, because they weren't made familiar with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
That's what's known as comprehensive sex eduction, the kind that lets people know, at appropriate points along their unstoppable maturation process, what's going on inside them, what that could lead to and more than one way to avoid it.
It's all true. It's all written down in lots of places. It could be looked up by young people themselves, or by their parents. But society as a whole does itself, or its youth, no favors to expect that either young people or their families will take care of those matters on their own, any more than we expect people to teach themselves history or math.
And, just as we don't (or shouldn't) teach history without the unpleasant parts, or math without the difficult bits, it makes no sense to teach young humans about human biology without including all there is to know about the reproductive systems that take up much of our physical and mental energy.
Board members who opposed moving forward with the regular update of the health standards worried openly that someone out there — specifically the professional educators who make up their staff — are too enamored of national trends to write some fit-for-Utah standards.
But the board will have the final say on what those standards are. And its members would be foolish to close their eyes and ears to things that have been tried and failed, or tried and not failed, elsewhere.
If nothing else, comprehensive sex ed should be seen as a means for working against such things as intergenerational poverty, homelessness and other problems that our leaders claim to be worried about.
We owe the next generation the full story. Unless we want the generation after that to show up a little too soon.