Sex education for all pupils 'needed to fight STD epidemic'

"Too many children are taught the basics of biology but not the emotional and social skills to help them handle sexual relationships, according to the Commons committee report" I can't help felling that this is a long-term cultural project, in reality. Our experience of raising kids seems to indicate that it is attitudes of parents and other significant adults that makes a huge difference, as well as the kind of upbringing that is full of healthy loving afirmation so that both the need to seek 'skin contact' to substitute for loving affirmation and the lack self-confidence to resist some kinds of peer-pressure are dealt with. We can't expect schools to deal with deeper and broader issues. Though I think we could expect them to help. Sexual promiscuity is not simply a personal choice: it has wider repurcussions on society which can be recognised as issues even by those who don't value sexuality as God-given and God-bounded.

So here's the argument in terms that matrialists can understand. STD's cost the nation money to treat. They cost productivity and they can cost lives. In addition, promiscuity weakens ties between children and parents [multiple partnerships] at cost to the emotional well-being of those children and add to the insecurity of life. In turn this adds costs to society in the form of dealing with the conflicts [caused by an insecure upbringing and averagely less adequate parenting?] and the healing that is necessary, arising from conflicts and unresolved 'issues'. Individualism hides the holistic costs of bad sexual choices. For the sake of the freedom of a few people to be relatively promiscuous without cost we now have a whole social system built on the presupposition of sexual licence. When it's a few people the cost are low: they are exploiting a social order where the stability provided by the majority of people behaving more or less 'uprightly'. However when that 'free' behaviour becomes the norm, it starts to cost society as a whole.

However, I'm not sure either that I like the look of the society that was rather too buttoned-down and rather intoloerant of difference .... can we have the best of both worlds? I suspect we can; but only by education and encouragement to freely choose the Good.

I also can't help feeling that the division of body from soul implicit in promiscuous sex is harmful to humans in the long term, but that needs some further thought. Promiscuity is a kind of gnostic heresy, in Christian terms. Perhaps we ought to be explaining the Christian view in terms more theologically informed by the gnostic debate than we have been doing. I'm up for it. In fact I hope to include it in a book I'm writing ....
The Observer | UK News | Sex education for all pupils 'needed to fight STD epidemic':