Is Sex Eroding Moral Values
Is Sex Eroding Moral Values?By: Natasha Adams
Moral can be defined loosely as "of good character". Values are "a belief, or standard". The question at hand is, has sex eroded moral values? Sex is everywhere. It is not limited to the bedroom anymore, but to the television, movies, billboards, office buildings and the White House. The open discussion and study of sex dates back only about a century, to the work of Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that sexuality was innate, present in humans at birth. Freud lived at a time when sexuality was considered unsavory, and was avoided in all polite conversation and social interaction. His breakthrough thinking affected social practices as well as therapeutic ones. In Freud's own era, the "moral fog that had enshrouded sexuality for most of the nineteenth century did not begin to lift until after the First World War" (Janus, 11). Where do we get our morals and values? Character education was what took place in school and society in the past. It was sometimes heavy-handed and always liable to abuse, but it seemed to serve our culture well over a long period of time. But what we have now, for the most part, is the "decision-making approach" (Kilpatrick, 16). In one form or another, sometimes as a course in itself, sometimes as a strategy in sex education classes, sometimes as a unit in civics or social sciences, it has set the tone for moral education in public and even private schools. "The shift from character education to the decision-making model was begun with the best of intentions. The new approach was meant to help students to think more independently and critically about values" (Kilpatric,16). Proponents claimed that a young person would be more committed to self-discovered values than to ones that were simply handed down by adults. That was the hope, but the actual consequences of the shift have been quite different. For students, it has meant wholesale confusion about moral values: learning to question values they have scarcely acquired, unlearning values taught at home, and concluding that questions of right and wrong are always merely subjective. We live in a sexual world, but Americans have been slow to fully acknowledge its enormous impact. Among those interviewed in the Janus Report who were 18 to 26 years old, 21% of the men and 15% of the women had had sexual intercourse by age 14; a small percentage of them had had their first intercourse before age 10. "It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people," said G. K. Chesterton in 1910. If that guarded approach applies anywhere, moral education would seem to be the place. "The Day America Told the Truth," a 1990 survey of American beliefs and values, contains this scene from a California high school: "It's Friday afternoon and the students are leaving a class in 'social living.' The teacher's parting words are, 'have a great weekend. Be safe. Buckle up. Just say 'No'... and...
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