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Promoting Marriage and
Family in SchoolMarch 10, 2006
By Julie M. Quist
The secret’s out that industrialized countries aren’t producing enough off-spring to maintain. Populations are aging. Businesses complain that a shortage of available labor is hurting their growth potential. It turns out that the popular notion of a dangerous ‘population bomb” is in reality a population bust.
Among the many culprits for our diminishing population is today’s cultural devaluation of marriage and children. Schools play a big role in devaluing motherhood by making it clear that the lives of women have value only if they work. Education leaders have adopted the idea that schools are for training children for vocations, rather than educating them for life. Business interests lobby government to provide universal preschool to free women for fulltime employment.
No wonder young women mistakenly believe that only careers will satisfy them. They discover, sometimes too late, that they’ve missed out. Many women go childless because they’ve waited too long.
But what’s the message kids get in school about the value of marriage and family? They could, for example be taught that one well documented remedy for poverty is building strong families and strong marriages. That information could be included in social studies, health, or even economics.
Instead, schools encourage young people to “achieve their full potential.” Guidelines for new federal abstinence grants specify teaching the benefits of marriage, causing one organization associated with Planned Parenthood to object. Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) is opposing curriculum that teaches that “non-marital sex in teen years may reduce the probability of a stable, happy marriage as an adult.”
SIECUS scorns teaching students that premarital sex can undermine healthy marriages.. These guidelines, they say, “violate the dignity and rights of sexually active students.”
We reap what we sow. If our communities allow organizations like SIECUS to set our standards, we have sewn the seeds of our own destruction.
Julie Quist is an education researcher and analyst, Vice-President and Political Director of EdWatch and Editor of EdWatch Newsletter.
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