Nexa wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Since the effective use of contraceptives increased during the same time that public education programs focused on abstinence rather then contraception, one should conclude that those teens choosing to have sex are making better choices despite not being taught them as much in school.
You're applying nation wide statistics to localized events. Nationally, contraception usage went up, not in the populations learning AO.
We are talking about a national issue, right? Isn't the entire point of sex education from a national level to reduce the national levels of teen pregnancy and STDs?
So yeah. I'm going to look at the important data. And "changing kids behaviors" isn't it. Especially when those don't tell us the final picture. What's most important is the rate of teen pregnancy, right? Everything else is smokescreen that can easily be manipulated to benefit one or another viewpoint.
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My undergraduate was in sociology with a focus on deviance and social control combined with gender studies. I have a master's in human development with a focus on human sexuality. I'm very familiar with how both kids and repressed adults react to sex education.
Yes. And I'm a guy who troubleshoots computer problems for a living. Which one of us do you think has the critical thinking skills to actually look at a set of data figure out what's going on and then institute a "real" solution that works?
That would be me btw.
Look. I'm sure you're good at your job and all that. But there's a world of difference between applying solutions someone else came up with, and actually developing your own on the fly as the need arises. I don't want this to come off snooty, but I just have very little respect for most soft sciences, especially for the field of sociology. It's very much a "grouthink" field. You follow a set methodology for doing something, not because it makes sense, but often purely because the biggest names in the field say that's how you should do things. Results are often purely subjective, so it's up to the person examining the results to decide if they met the expectation or not. Thus, it's very rarely results driven, and more often consensus driven.
You literally do things the way you do because that's what most of the people in your field think you should do. If tomorrow, the majority decide to adopt "joe's" theory instead of "bob's", you'll do things in a new and completely different way and think nothing of it. I'm sorry, but to me, that's the most bizarre "science" ever invented. The only thing scarier then the field itself and its illogical conclusions is that it's used almost exclusively to drive social engineering via things like our public school system...