‘Comprehensive sex education’ undermines students’ moral development
by Tapio Puolimatka, MercatorNet:
[…] Von Hildebrand points out that instead of fostering objectivity, critical thinking, and autonomy, amoral sex education fails to develop young people’s potential for value-response and thereby fails to contribute to the unfolding of their human potential in general. Insofar as their moral capacity remains undeveloped, they become incapable of discerning and resisting sexual exploitation.
Von Hildebrand regarded the cultivation of value-responses such as love, faithfulness, admiration, veneration, and reverence as central for sex education. Separated from moral values, sex education becomes a way of narrowing and cramping the human personality. Amoral sex education undermines students’ moral agency, their capacity to evaluate desires, consider reasons, form intentions, and make and implement decisions based on their value experience. It fails to support the development of morally conscious persons capable of forming mature moral judgments based on their perception of values as moral agents who can make evaluative judgments without succumbing to relativism.
Morally “neutral” sex education teaches that there are no absolute sexual norms: all forms of sexual behaviour based on mutual consent are normal and acceptable. In a sense, young people are left to decide for themselves. But insofar as there are no adequate normative criteria to help them choose among competing lifestyles, their choices will not be free in any meaningful sense of the term. Instead, their choices will be arbitrary, based on only the whim of the moment, as Hanan Alexander points out.
When all sexual alternatives are presented as of equal value, young people will find it difficult to perceive the different moral implications and social consequences of various lifestyles.
Sexual experimentation numbs the sensitivity needed to perceive the true nature of love and the values inherent in it.
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