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The surgeon general of the United States, C. Everett Koop, is now under attack by conservatives who charge that he has strayed from the fold.
As the guardian of the nation's health, Koop sees AIDS as a deadly epidemic. Children must be warned about it, and Koop believes the schools should do the job.
Since AIDS is transmitted sexually, educating children about the disease means a thorough sex education program in every grade from kindergarten on up. This horrifies conservatives, who fear that sex education will encourage youths to be even more interested in sex than they already are, resulting in more promiscuity, more teen-age pregnancies, more broken families.
Those outraged conservatives obviously haven't given this much thought, or they'd realize that our schools will offer sex education the same way as they teach everything else. It's unlikely that morality will suffer as a result.
For instance, there are certain joys and satisfactions to putting words together and making them perform -- to use words to make people laugh or cry, to explain something complicated, to protest or to praise, to entertain or to annoy.
That's why writing can be delightful. As writing is taught in the lower grades, it's an adjunct to the obsolete and tedious art of penmanship. In the upper grades, the student is graded not by how convincingly he says whatever he has to say, but by his assemblage of 3x5 cards and footnotes. Get to college, and the student who writes a simple declarative sentence, instead of a pompous farrago of dependent clauses and passive verb constructions, is the student who will fail.
At no point during formal education is writing ever presented as a pleasant experience, so it's no wonder that most people grit their teeth while doing their academic papers, and give up on writing entirely as soon as they're out of school.
Book publishers often complain of a decline in American literacy. But think back to your schooldays. Was reading ever mentioned as something someone might do for mere entertainment?
Of course not. Professional educators scoured English literature to find the dullest books known, tiresome tomes like Great Expectations, Silas Marner and Turn of the Screw.
Even in those monumentally humdrum works, a reader might perchance feel an emotion, identify with a character, grow tense with suspense or laugh at some irony. But not if the book was required for school, which meant taking notes, trying to memorize obscure characters' names and hoping that the teacher would never call on you.
People would give up television, too, if teachers took half-hour situation comedies as seriously as they take popular fiction of an earlier time.
Science can be fun when it's a way to learn how the world works. But it isn't taught that way.
A few years ago, one of my daughters was learning about freezing points and boiling points and the like. Thinking I might help her, I fetched a dairy thermometer and went to the stove. We saw that water boils at 93° Celsius at our altitude.
She pointed out that her textbook said water boiled at 100°, so I explained atmospheric pressure and its effect on boiling points. She enjoyed science until her test, whereat she put 93 instead of 100, and got it wrong. The teacher said that it didn't matter what result we got with boiling water and a thermometer -- the students were being graded by how well they memorized what was in the book.
That's science? If the teaching of science in America isn't anything more than forcing students to memorize numbers, then we need not wonder why other nations are getting a technological edge on us. Thanks to our marvelous educational system, most Americans find science irrelevant and boring.
So conservatives ought to encourage the schools to offer sex education. Not just offer it, but require at least two hours a day in every grade. Use a curriculum devised by the same professional educators who manage to take the fun out of every other interesting pursuit they get their hands on.
Teen-age sex will quickly become as popular as teen-age geography or teen-age English. Any throes of adolescent passion will be overpowered by academic fears: Was this how the book said it should be done? Don't we need to start with an outline? Or is it 3"x5" notecards we're supposed to do first? Maybe it's the topic sentence? Will this be on the test?
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