Sex Education

Matt Mireles (Youth Opinion, March 9) is right that ignorance helps no one and that it is ignorance that fuels the opposition to sex education in schools.

What is needed is guidance to assist young people to make informed choices. And there is the difficulty. Should this guidance be religious based, as the Christian Coalition demands? Should it be nonjudgmental values clarification as liberals insist? Or is there some middle ground compromise that will give kids the support they need to navigate adolescence?

Perhaps sex education should be a mandatory parent-child seminar, held in the evening or on weekends, with parents expected to participate with their children. Teachers then could offer facts and statistics, and students and their parents could determine the meaning of that information and the values that should be based on it.

RITCH BARRON

Garden Grove