John Oliver's recent episode on sex education featured on his show "Last Week Tonight" demonstrates how much farther we need to go to provide adequate information on sex education and reproductive health in our country's schools. Roughly 44% of Americans unknowingly assume sex education is part of the Common Core curriculum, but it is not. In reality, the lack of adequate sex education in high school could lead to incorrect knowledge later on about reproductive health.

Beyond the biology of sex education, there's a feeing that "most adults don't tell the real truth about sex," in the classroom and at home, perpetuating the taboo of sex education. Often when schools do provide sex education, it is conflated with having sex, rather than an understanding of reproductive anatomy and function. Indeed, only 22 states have mandated sex education courses and only 13 states requrire sex education instruction to be medically accurate, troubling statistics! John Oliver states "There is no way we'd allow any other academic program to consistently fail to prepare students for life after school," and he's right. It's time to provide accurate, biologically-sound education surrounding sex and reproductive health. Understanding the biological facets of sex education as well as the social and health-related repercussions better inform students to make more holistic choices regarding their health. Indeed, Dr. Teresa Woodruff at the Women's Health Research Institute is launching a MOOC (a free online course) entitled "Introduction to Reproduction" on September 1, 2015 to better educate a network of students on reproductive health from the biological perspective.

Click Here to watch John Oliver's Episode on Sex Ed

Source: Pacific Standard