School programs have been a norm in our society, dealing with sexual education and drug and violence prevention, among others, yet these various programs deal with these matters poorly. The problem with the current system is that it has become the status quo.
Lawmakers and other scholastic decision-makers feel their constituency has been appeased when a chunk of money is thrown in their direction. What makes it worse is that parents have not felt any desire to improve the current system. Socio-economic factors, however, play a role in determining which programs are more important for any one community.
The current school drug-prevention programs are constantly found to have little or no affect. The rate of drug use for high school students has steadily increased since 1991 because of the understanding of students that certain narcotics are not harmful. As parents lean more toward the acceptance of "school parenting," the burden is not only being placed on the schools to provide these programs, but also on the students who learn nothing from them and are potentially denied quality parenting – an extreme asset.
The most immediate impact, however, is on the tax payers who allow the funds to be provided for this anti-drug campaign rather than using the money to provide for better education.
American parents want sexual education in their schools. The first flaw in this is that parent and non-parent taxpayers cannot decide on what to teach kids in sexual education. Will we learn about oral sex, STDs, birth control, homosexuality or abstinence? What exactly is sexual education? And you should ask yourself, "What subject do I have to give up in order to learn a topic I should be learning from my parents?" Could it be math, which reveals logic, or the English language that is absent in our youth? Or what about physical education? Everyone can agree we don’t need it anymore since we have computer games such as World of Warcraft and weight-loss drugs such as Lipozene.
So has the word "parent" become a paradox? Is the battle of parent versus taxpayer beginning to show the signs of a victor? In this society the greatest common denominator that is being subtracted from each situation is communication. Being a parent is not hard. I don’t mean getting up six times a night to a crying baby, changing diapers every two to three hours or putting together a bicycle for Christmas, I mean the teaching part, the example part. Communication is all it takes to put violent games and movies into context; communication is all it takes to teach little Bobby and Mary about drugs and sex.
If you take away drugs, violent games and movies, the human race would not die off. Take away sex; will we perish? Reproductively, no. Take away communication; will we die? Yes. We as a society and species cannot survive without our various forms of communication. If this tool means our society’s survival then it should be worth an attempt to see how your child or dependent responds to communication and actual teaching.
