If there was ever a touchy subject...

...it would be this one. Let's face it, most of us have been, are, and will remain to be somewhat preoccupied with sex throughout our lives. The human race has always been preoccupied with the subject of sex; we have struggled for centuries to define it, normalize it, decide what is acceptable, and most importantly, what is NOT acceptable. Sex may be the longest, ongoing conundrum that our world has ever known; it is social, political, personal, and religious.
In light of all of this, if sex is such an important issue, where do we learn about it? At home with our parents? In the school yard with our girlfriends? Cosmopolitan or GQ magazine? In school?
We are all supposed to have a sexual education as part of our formal schooling, mine was included as a unit in Grade 9 gym class. Grade 9 gym is mandatory in Ontario, which means that everyone in my high school got sexual education. However, are these programs effective? What exactly are they teaching the youth of today? Where are the boundaries drawn between what students need to know and what is inappropriate to teach them? And, maybe the most difficult question of all, who decides what we are supposed to teach these kids? Who decides what is right, what is wrong, what is appropriate, and what is not?
While developing the idea for this blog as a final project for my Contemporary Issues in Education class, I asked a few friends what their sexual education experiences had been. I expected to hear things similar to what I had experiened, i.e. abstinence-centred program that discussed the different methods of contraception, how to use them, and how effective they were. We also discusses STD's at length, with everyone in the class doing a project on a different STD. However, this is not what I discovered. One of my friends, who went to school in Vancouver, didn't have sex education at all. She claims she just missed it, that others got it, but she slipped through the cracks of the system. Another friend, who went to a Mennonite school in Ontario, told me that her program had the class watch a birthing video. Another, who went to school in Manitoba, told me that her school's program was extremely fear-based with the basic message being something of the "do not have sex, you will get pregnant, you will contract an STD, and your life will be over" variety. So, as you can see, in my somewhat small social group alone, we have had very different experiences with sexual education. I am sure you can all find problems in every single one of these programs. 
This is the main purpose of my project blog, to discuss various problems in sexual education today by reviewing some of the recent literature, and discussing the findings, implications, and suggestions that are presented in these articles. The goal here is that, by the end of this series, we have a clearer picture of where sex education is today, what is working, what is not, and how we can change it. As a (hopeful) future educator, I hope to be inspired, and to actively apply some of these findings in my future classroom. So, with all of these questions in mind, let's dive in! There is much to talk about...