by Kevin Ryan –
If students attend schools which are run as sexual playgrounds, is it any wonder if they fail to learn?
Over the last three decades, social scientists, educational researchers, and pundits have probed for the reason why educationally the US on the fringe of being a Third World country. In particular, why does the academic achievement of American students begin to fall off during junior high and plummet during the high school years?
The “failure theories” are many: our schools are too big; our schools are too small; our school year is too short; our school day is too long; our teachers are too dumb or too lazy or under paid; our parents don’t care; we don’t give the schools enough money. Critics endlessly opine that our students don’t have enough arts, enough sports; enough science, enough math. They don’t have enough homework; they have too much homework. What is being missed from the analyses is the teenagers’ elephant in the room, their Kim Kardashian at the Sunday school picnic: sex.
In the pre-Big Media era, young people learned about the “birds and the bees” and how to make their way sexually in the world from their parents, the church, their friends, the surrounding culture and schools. However, in the US today, parents, for a range of reasons from overextended single mothers to golf-distracted fathers, are having a limited impact on their children’s sexual education.
Our churches are still there, but fewer and fewer young people are attending. Also, most pulpits speak to the young with diminished authority. Their friends are swimming in the same sexual soup of confusion and misinformation as they. Today the “surrounding culture” is a mix of TV, the Internet, and various “i” devices. The dominant message from these media to young Americans is the modern variant of “eat drink and be merry for tomorrow you die.” Or, more like, eat, drink and, by all means, express yourself sexually early and often.
The dispensers of sexual wisdom
With two key “teachers,” parents and churches, hobbled on the sidelines, the primary influencers are the media and the schools. Our media moguls, free speech warriors all, long ago learned that the best way to attract customers’ eyes in order to sell soap, cars and beer is to show a little skin. As a result, today’s screens are a variable torrent of naked flesh. To learn the exquisite secrets of the female body, boys no longer have to read National Geographic by flashlight under the bedcovers. Galaxies of porn sites are just clicks away.
So, for most American children, this leaves our schools as the institutions best set up to pass on the community’s sexual wisdom. After all, schools have trained “learning specialists.” And they have a captive audience during youth’s formative years. How, then, are our schools doing?
First, the surface symptoms and, then, the results. A casual stroll through the halls of many high schools or a conversation with an experienced teacher will provide myriad indicators of the sexual environment within which we are raising our children. The cafeteria, halls, and locker rooms ricochet with f-bombs and sex-laced taunts. Nuzzling at lockers and fondling in the school’s dark corners is a staple. Girls appear to be competing in a stripper’s fashion show. Boys look like they are trying out for 1930-ish gangster movies.
Meanwhile teachers and administrators drift through the halls like those see-no-evil-hear-no-evil monkeys. However, teachers and students alike are well aware of the sexual bullying, the swopping of electronic porn sights, cell phone cameras flashing in the locker room and quickly sexting around the school.
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Excerpt from: CERC
