1877 Just like mother

When my college roommate and I got together in Seattle in 1996 we both said, "You look just like your mother." So we here in the U.S. (and probably Canada, too) look just like old momsy across the pond. If the government tries something and it doesn't work, the solution is to make it even bigger. Melanie Phillips writes about sex education in Britain, and the story is going to sound uncomfortably familiar.

"All the evidence suggests that its sex education policy is a disaster. Britain has the highest rate of under-age teenage pregnancies in Europe. The proportion of 13- to 15-year-olds who are getting pregnant is rising. Sexually transmitted diseases among young people are going through the roof."

So what should be done? Why begin even earlier, of course--with five year olds and compulsory sex education. In education, if it doesn't work, expand the program.

"No sooner will a child have found his or her coat-peg and be measuring up the competition for the climbing frame than some teacher will be rattling off where babies come from. So while many children are not taught to read properly at five — indeed, a disgraceful number can barely read and write when they leave primary school at the age of 11 — they will be given ‘more rounded’ lessons on sex and relationships. Is this not grotesquely inappropriate?"

So the gibberish about relationships and responsibility is just moved down a few years. Oh my. How do you clarify values that haven't even been instilled?

"The increase in sexual promiscuity among children and teenagers is not due to ignorance but to the deliberate destruction of the notion of respectability. Not only are official blind eyes turned to enforcing the legal age of consent, but sex education actually targets under-age children.

Moral guidance is nowhere. Instead, sex education seeks to ‘clarify’ the child’s own values. But children need clear boundaries of behaviour. Treating them as if they have adult values is to abandon and even abuse them."