Sexuality is a touchy subject for many people, and speaking about the subject in front of an audience may be embarrassing at times. Alas, no matter how uncomfortable the topic may be, responsible sexual behavior is crucial for every person’s health, especially for young teens, as they are going through puberty and are at an experimental age. Nowadays, we have fourteen-year-old girls as mothers and sexually transmitted diseases spreading throughout high schools all over America. Sexual education provides teens with the knowledge of how to conduct safe sexual behavior because, let’s face it: they’re going to do it anyway, so we might as well teach them how to do it with protection. With the media advertising sexual experiences as a norm, teaching both Israeli and American kids how to be safe through sex-ed is definitely a must.
A recent study was conducted at the Kibbutz Seminar College in Israel on the sexual educa-tion taught in Israeli schools. The study revealed “that 86 percent of Israeli students did not receive extensive sex-education as children, and that their knowledge of the subject was lacking even as adults” (The Jerusalem Post). This leaves an overwhelming majority of Is-raeli youth without formal sex-education. But sex-ed has clear advantages for the health of society and can help prevent teen pregnancy, so why are Israeli public and private schools neglecting it? A Haaretz article reports that Israel is ranked as the fourth most-educated country in the world, although it appears to be blatantly disregarding a key element of education for every individual.
As the homeland for the Jewish people, a large portion of Israel’s population includes reli-gious Jews. Religious Jewish Israelis work in all types of fields, including education. There are many private schools in Israel that are comprised only of religious Jews – both faculty and students. There are also, however, many public schools that are managed by secular faculty, but that have religious individuals who work as teachers and attract a mixture of religious and secular students. This mixes religious and secular Jews into the Israeli education system, and that’s where it gets complicated.
In religious Jewish communities, premarital sex is frowned upon, and many parents go to great lengths to prevent their children from being exposed to sexualized content. For this reason, sexual education is not taught in Israeli schools: educators are reluctant to teach it because parents and students resist it. Dr. Ilana Brosh found in her study that “research revealed a correlation between one’s exposure to sex education and one’s religious affilia-tion.”
In America, there are many religious Jewish Day Schools throughout the country that strug-gle with this issue as well. “You have to teach the ideas in a way without promoting them,” says Rabbi Benji Owen, the head of Judaic studies at Northwest Yeshiva High School. Reli-gious schools, both in Israel and in America, must confront the issue of teaching sex-ed, without promoting sexual activity among their students.
Sexual education can only take off in Israel if educators are willing to teach it. Brosh found that “religious students demonstrated meager knowledge of the subject [of sexuality].” This may be because in the religious schools, the faculty consists of only observant educators who choose to exclude sex-ed from their lesson plans, with little resistance from parents. The parents and teachers may believe that sex-ed itself is a form of encouraging sexual behavior, an ideal that is exactly the opposite of how they want to educate their children as religious Jews. Instead of teaching sex-ed, parents and teachers ignore the subject altogether, hoping that one day, the kids will figure it out on their own. Similarly, in public schools, secular teachers in favor of teaching sex-ed may face resistance from religious students and their parents. So, to be safe, both secular and religious Israeli schools avoid sex-ed altogether, which is the reason Israeli students do not receive formal sex-education.
As Israeli society becomes modernized, religious people must face their children’s exposure to sexuality as an inevitable reality. Today, exposure to sexuality can come from watching TV, searching the Internet, turning on the radio or even from billboard advertisements when walking down Rechov Yaffo. Young males and females are surrounded by sexuality in their everyday life and it severely impacts them. Society promotes sexuality in an unhealthy way, as it encourages males to objectify females, and this leads women and girls to view their bodies as sex objects. The media advertises sex as a norm, but safe, protected sex is hardly mentioned. Without formal sex-education, teens only learn about sex from the skewed media advertisements.
Instead of Israeli parents and teachers avoiding the topic of sexuality to a point where it is taboo, all Israeli parents, as well as American Jewish parents, should not only allow, but also petition to the schools for their children to be educated about sexuality in a healthy way. If parents do this, then teachers will be more willing to teach it. The purpose of sex-ed is not to encourage teens to be sexually active; rather, it is simply a way to educate youth about sexuality in a healthy way so they will not be swayed by today’s distorted societal views.