Avoiding the Subject

Your Two Bits

By William Perry
BC schools are failing when it comes to sex education.

Ericka, 18, learned about sex all over the place: from music, from gossip on the street and, especially, from watching her peers. "Mostly all my friends became pregnant," she says, a college student and graduate of a BC public school. "My closest friend became pregnant and dropped out. And another one just had her baby."

One place she didn't get much in the way of sex education, she says, was from her teachers. That's because the BC public school students rarely get taught about safe sex, and then almost never before high school, according to teachers and sex education advocates.

This is despite a shockingly high rate of pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease among BC teens. A sampling of 2010 provincial data and 2009 stats: The rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia infections of youth between age 15 and 19 are, respectively, four and six times higher than the nationwide average. And 15 percent of all births in the province in 2008 were to mothers age 19 or younger.

BC falls far below what would be considered the standard. It depends on the school what education gets taught. There's a certain amount required in the curriculum, but it's mostly just anatomy, and it's mostly just in the upper grades.

BC School Districts reject the accusations, saying they "offer a comprehensive sexual education curriculum," and that "to say the curriculum focuses mostly on anatomy would be a vast understatement."

Ericka says her education was hardly comprehensive.

"The only time we got a chance to really talk about it was, like, half a class. We had a gym class and the lady took us to a room and talked to us. But that only happened like two times," she says. Condoms were not demonstrated or distributed. Most of the class focused on "how periods come on, and how you know whether you're pregnant or not, and how the baby was born."

Simply explaining pregnancy does not help youth prevent it; hundreds of children are born to teenage mothers in BC every year, according to the most recent year for which data is available.

When you're 15 and someone is pressuring you into something you may not want to do, knowing what your fallopian tubes are won't help. As a father of daughters, I argue that sex education should be pragmatic and focused on decision-making.

Ericka says that she received no more health education after ninth grade, and doesn't recall any courses in elementary or middle school. And that is where it matters most. Fifteen percent of BC teens lose their virginity before age 13. Many high school students have already had sex when they are first taught how to do it safely; some are already pregnant.

One former teacher in a BC high school told this Columnist that her students had received no sex education when they arrived in her classroom.
"They gave me the health class. They told me that there was no curriculum for it and to just make it up. I have no experience in that field at all, and I asked the kids what they wanted to learn about. And they had so many questions about sexual everything because there was no sex education. So I ended up teaching it for half the year. But I wasn't required to do it," the teacher says. "If they had not had me, they would not have had it at all."

Christina (name changed for this article), a BC teacher who received her doctorate in education, wrote her dissertation on local girls moving from eighth to ninth grade. She says what little is taught depends entirely on a school's teachers and principal.

"I saw so many promising young women not graduate," Christina says. "You have so much hope for these kids, and two to three years later, they're pregnant."

Especially in lower-performing schools, the intense focus on boosting standardized test scores has decreased time spent on health.

It should be mandated. We should be as concerned about the health education of the children of BC as we are about their reading and math scores.

Eighty percent of BC people support publicly-funded comprehensive sexual health information in school. Parents and students said they want more input into sexual health education. And over 75% of adults think youth should have a significant voice in the sex education they receive.

For more information about Teenage Pregnancy visit: and BC Vital Statistics: