TV REVIEW : ‘Schools’: Teens in Middle of Sex-Education Dilemma

Let’s see if we have this right.

America is supposedly a Puritanical country. No industrialized nation claims a higher rate of religious affiliation. Politicians touting the religious right’s version of family values win elections.

Yet, according to (unreferenced) statistics cited in the WNET-produced, Jane Pauley-hosted report “Sex, Teens and Public Schools,” 89% of American adults favor some form of sex education in schools. Most teens are sexually active. An increasing percentage of active girls are getting pregnant, and more than half of them choose to have the child. Which dramatically increases their chances of having a second child. Which nearly guarantees them a life of poverty. Which puts their children at risk of the kind of instability that leads to a life of unwanted children and poverty. And so on.

Like no other issue, public-school sex education highlights the republic’s internal contradictions between its liberal political identity and its conservative, moralistic soul. Parents continue to be mostly terrified of teaching their kids the basics about sex, yet are skittish about allowing the schools to teach too much. Girls have everyday contact with peers who are saddled with raising a child before they’re really ready, and yet see motherhood--even at 13--as a quick route to adulthood. Many schools have on-campus sex clinics, yet cannot distribute and prescribe contraception.

Lucidly written by co-producer-director Roger Weisberg, this hourlong look at real teen Angst displays all of these contradictions, and more.

There’s the spectacle of fundamentalist Christians gaining a majority on the school board of Vista, Calif., pushing through a sex-ed manual that teaches only about abstinence and nothing about birth control, and a resulting rise in Vista teen pregnancies during the period of the Christian majority. (They were voted out last November.)

There’s the revealing survey called “Plain Talk,” which has teens go undercover to health clinics to try to obtain services, only to find that free clinics can be alienating to the teens who need them most.

Finally, there’s the depressing refrain of teen parents recalling the absence of their own parents.

“Sex, Teens and Public Schools” leaves some strong impressions, but two of them stand out in high relief. The first is that Christian advocates of sex-ed without contraception information seem to have no explanation for the common finding that teaching birth control in the classroom steers students away from unwanted pregnancies and toward abstinence. The second is that teen mothers appear to be out there by themselves, with little or no support from the father who got them into this mess in the first place.

* “Sex, Teens and Public Schools” airs at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.