Hello, Internet! This past week, I have been up to my neck in preparations for the William and Mary High School Model United Nations conference, for which I was part of the general staff. My main jobs were making the printers work (Have you ever had to tear down and re-install the firmware on an HP laserjet printer? How about making an industrial copier stop pulling the printed copies back into the ink rollers? Neither of these are fun things to do.) and stacking, unstacking, and setting up chairs. That would be why I have posted nothing this week. Ah, but you didn't come for a LiveJournal entry, you came for my thoughts on politics, and so we turn to another subject dear to the hearts of many of my fellow college students, partying. Specifically, I am talking about how the way we deal with alcohol, drugs, and sex in education and parenting is not just unhelpful but actively devastating.
Let us take the example of a hypothetical child named Joseph. Joseph grew up in a small town in Virginia. In health class, he was taught certain key points. First: Any and all drugs will instantly kill you or reduce you to a drooling vegetable and, if by some miracle you survive that, you will be forever in hock to some shady guy selling you drugs. Second, premarital sex will result in a demon leaping up from the core of the earth to devour your soul via your genitals and you will get every STD ever (The folks in Richmond have some odd ideas about what sex is and seem to confuse it with some kind of virgin sacrifice ritual). Third, alcohol is some kind of liquid chemical warfare agent that will cause your brain to melt and turn you into some sort of amnesiac rape machine (Again, I'm not sure where the Department of Education gets their material, because it sure isn't actual science). Between health class, DARE, and those lovely informational pamphlets given out by the counseling department (if you ever saw one you know what I mean), Joseph is convinced of the truth of all of these things.
Time moves on and Joseph, a diploma in his hands and dreams of a bright future in his head, goes off to college. Pretty soon, Joseph gets invited to a party by his roommate and, seeking a good time and some relief from the stress of the transition, he goes. Here he sees all kinds of things. He sees people drinking beer and other things and not keeling over dead on the spot. He tries a beer and finds that, aside from not tasting great (This is a frat party, so it's cheap beer) nothing bad happens to him. He sees some friends passing a joint of marijuana around and being totally fine. Maybe he even tries some. It's entirely possible Joseph even experiences some of that premarital sex he was warned off of. As he progresses through the night, he slowly realizes that literally everything he was taught in school about these things was either a ridiculous exaggeration or an outright lie. Joseph then goes totally off the rails and, the next day, is in the hospital from an overdose. Or alcohol poisoning. Or doing something stupid while he was drunk. This is not a hypothetical, by the way, more an aggregate of things I've seen.
Now, the head-in-the-sand types would argue that this is exactly why we must teach our children to fear the demon drink, to turn from the temptations of anything that might be a drug, and to immediately reject the advances of anyone he is not married to. I disagree. Ignorance is not armor. What you don't know can (and does) hurt you. Quite frankly, teens and young adults are not that bright in many cases. We will try things just to see what happens. You don't prevent that by making sure we have absolutely no idea what we're getting into. You make things better by teaching people, giving them the tools and the knowledge to make good decisions. Information is a tool. Understanding is a tool. Fear and willful blindness are not tools. They are the exact opposite of that. I understand, sort of, the people who don't want to corrupt their children by exposing them to knowledge. The thinking goes, I think, that they will try it if they know about it. As I said, though, they will try it anyway. See, we don't live in a bubble. I absolutely guarantee you that they will be exposed to these things despite your best efforts because of that little factor called the rest of the world. By all means, teach your kids not to drink and do drugs and have sex if that's what you think is right, but do it with actual information. Lessons should be based on the reality kids will encounter so that they can make sense of what they see instead of deciding that they have been lied to their whole lives. With good decisions and the right knowledge, you can safely enjoy yourself without fear of whatever it is "they" think will happen. Information is good. Ignorance is not.
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