For those who have been saying education is the answer to AIDS, Secretary of Education William Bennett has provided the tool. In order to implement an AIDS curriculum, all the public schools need is Bennett’s newly-released 28-page booklet called “AIDS and the Education of Our Children: A Guide for Parents and Teachers.”
The booklet doesn’t use either scare talk or false assurances. It doesn’t engage in so-called gay-bashing, but neither does it conceal the fact that voluntary homosexual acts are the principal mode of AIDS transmission.
A simple chart in Bennett’s book makes this clear: 90 percent got AIDS through either homosexual acts or IV drug use. In addition, 3 percent got AIDS from transfusions of blood that came from AIDS-carrying donors. That leaves 4 percent who got AIDS from heterosexual acts and 3 percent who got AIDS from undetermined causes.
Of those who have contracted AIDS, more than half are now dead and the rest are dying. Their care is very costly, and there is no cure in sight.
The biggest public health problem is the estimated million and a half persons who are infected with the AIDS virus but don’t yet show any symptoms; they are just as contagious as though they had full-blown AIDS, and most will develop the disease themselves within the next 10 years. Most of these million and a half AIDS carriers have not been tested and do not know they can transmit the AIDS virus.
Since most cases of AIDS result from behavior that can be avoided, the first task of preventive medicine should be to prevent the uninfected from engaging in that avoidable behavior with the million and a half persons who are infected.
Adults have the freedom to engage in high-risk activity if they wish. However, society’s primary challenge is what to teach minor children in the schools. Secretary of Education Bennett takes his position seriously, and his new booklet addresses this question. It would seem self-evident that children should, in emphatic terms, be instructed that they should NOT engage in high-risk activities. In other words, they should be taught to just say NO to illegal drugs and premarital sex.
There is no proof that schoolchildren reject this message. Nevertheless, this message is being resisted; certain groups of adults are exerting tremendous pressures to try to tell us that it is “impossible” for children to be taught to say no.
But is it really impossible? Another chart in Secretary Bennett’s booklet shows that 55 percent of girls are virgins at age 18; 73 percent are virgins at age 17, and 86 percent are virgins at age 16.
The figures for boys are not that high, but they are high enough to give the lie to the notion that they cannot be taught abstinence. At age 18, 36 percent of the boys are virgins; at age 17 the figure is 53 percent, and at age 16 the figure is 72 percent.
It stands to reason that, if the majority of teenagers are sexually abstinent, then sexual abstinence is possible for anyone. It should be a simple matter, using the realistic threat of AIDS and other venereal diseases, plus the problems associated with teenage pregnancies, to install a convincing curriculum that will significantly increase those percentages.
We certainly cannot say that teaching abstinence has been tried and failed because it has never been tried. When sex education came into the schools about 15 years ago, it came in value-free. Children were just instructed in “animal sex” and how to do it, without being told that it was possible or desirable to exercise self-control.
Secretary Bennett’s booklet is so straightforward that it is refreshing. He says that schools should “help children develop clear standards of right and wrong” because that is the most important determinant of children’s actions. They should be taught self-discipline, personal responsibility, and accountability for their actions.
Bennett urges parents and teachers to establish clear and specific rules about behavior. They should speak up for the institution of the family and help children resist peer pressures to engage in dangerous activities.
The Bennett booklet identifies guidelines for selecting teaching materials about AIDS. School materials should emphasize standards of “right and wrong,” and should not be value neutral.
Schoolchildren should be taught to abstain from sexual activity until, as adults, they are ready to establish a mutually faithful marriage. That anyone could consider these guidelines controversial is quite a commentary on how promiscuous our society has become. But controversial or not, they are essential for a healthy society.
