Teach Kids Self-Mastery!

Consider this a follow-on to my earlier post, Are We Too Shameless?

Conservative columnist Cal Thomas' March 7, 2005, column, "The Cucumber Curriculum," which can be read here, talks about recent trends in high-school sex education in Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. A recently introduced curriculum will purportedly include demonstrations of how to put a condom on a cucumber. Homosexual couples will be characterized as "the newest American 'family.'" And students will be taught "to 'develop' a sexual identity." Mr. Thomas objects to all these initiatives.

He prefers that high-schoolers be taught sexual abstinence, noting that only 27 percent of 13- to 16-year-olds are sexually active. "Why, then, not focus our program on encouraging those who are abstinent to continue on that path, while trying to turn around the 27 percent who are sexually active?" asks Mr. Thomas.

In related news, Baltimore Sun features columnist Susan Reimer recently penned "In essay, Loyola professor likens coed dorms to brothels" (available until it expires here). Ms. Reimer's beat is family issues, particularly child-rearing. In this piece she bemoans gender-neutral living arrangements at colleges and universities as places where "female students ... feel pressured to participate in the casual sex that coed dorms make possible in order to prove their sexual health."

Reimer echoes Vigen Guroian, a theology professor and father of a daughter in college, who has published an essay in Christianity Today (read it here) criticizing coed dorms for making promiscuity "practically obligatory," in the words of one female student's essay which Guroian cites. Since institutions of higher learning are "taking money for this" — charging fees for dorm housing — they in Guroian's view are guilty of pandering. Colleges, says Guroian, have "forfeited the responsibilities of in loco parentis and have gone into the pimping and brothel business."

I for one doubt that's a useful comparison to make. Too heated, too overblown — as when Cal Thomas compares the Montgomery County sex-education initiative to

... a "movement" in California to create gender-neutral toilets in public places so that transsexuals and even people with "androgynous identity who do not consider themselves completely male or female," in the words of a New York Times story [available here], might feel comfortable.

But, anyway, it occurs to me that what is really needed is to teach our kids self-control: per the dictionary, restraint exercised over one's own impulses, emotions, or desires. Kids need, more than anything today, to be taught how to cultivate their capacity for self-government or self-mastery. After all, it is "peer pressure" as much as "the way things are set up" which Guroian's female informants cite as why coed dorms lead to "practically obligatory" promiscuity.

And Cal Thomas assumes the initially optional Sex Ed course in Montgomery County will soon become de facto obligatory:

Once "legitimacy" is established, pressure will be applied to make anyone who doesn't take the course feel like an outsider. Many will conform in order to avoid being "stigmatized."

Not wanting to be "stigmatized" and allowing "peer pressure" to make your decisions for you are sure signs that kids haven't been taught self-mastery sufficiently well.


There is much about self-government or self-mastery which could be likened to that old-fashioned word, chastity.

"To be chaste means to experience things, all things, respectfully and to drink them in only when we are ready for them. ... Unbridled restlessness makes us unhealthily impatient for experience ... Greed and impatience push us toward irresponsible experience," writes Ronald Rolheiser, a Catholic priest, in The Shattered Lantern.

By that definition, abstinence is indeed a major "chastity strategy" ... but not the only one. The others — even if they are restricted to married sex — could demand use of the (shall we call it) "cucumber procedure."

And we need to get real: there is going to continue to be sex pressure in coed college dorms. Our kids need to be prepared to withstand it. If we don't intend to teach them chastity because of the word's now-obsolete connotations of sexual repression, let's call it self-mastery instead and get on with the job.

Note, finally, that kids are going to develop a sexual identity, a process which Cal Thomas says he underwent "as a child in the bathtub without the help of my public school." He was lucky; for some kids the "bathtub test" isn't suffcient. For some of them, what kind of genitalia they have will turn out not to define who they will become. Budding gays, lesbians, androgynes, transsexuals, and to-be-transgendered individuals need to learn self-mastery just as badly as anyone else.

So, why can't we all agree that teaching self-mastery ought to be one of the primary responsibilities of our schools? Conservatives can think of it as teaching chastity. Liberals, as self-government. But one and all ought to be able to get behind it as an antidote to peer-pressure-induced mistakes and out-of-control teen behavior.