Word: koop
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Politically, Koop's statements last month came one step ahead of an AIDS study that might have proved embarrassing to the Administration: a National Academy of Sciences report warned that the AIDS epidemic "could become a catastrophe" without strong White House leadership and a campaign of education and research that would probably cost $2 billion by 1990. Whether Koop's motive was political or not, his report plunged the nation into a thicket of legal and moral questions. Is it unwise to tell third-graders about anal sex and the connection between sex, AIDS and death? Is it the proper...
Some proponents of sex education had reservations about Koop's report. Stanford Education Professor Michael Kirst said schools are overburdened enough without becoming the official problem-solving arena for the nation's sex problems. Said Kirst: "Every time schools take on value-laden topics, they end up losing overall public support. It's a no-win ball game." The national president of Planned Parenthood, Faye Wattleton of New York City, offered Koop only cold praise. Reason: she wants upbeat instruction, not just education "within the context of preventing a deadly disease...
...Koop's most explosive proposal is the idea of teaching eight-year- olds about AIDS. Only 23% of those surveyed in the TIME poll agreed with the suggestion. Most professional educators seem opposed. "If you brought up anal sex to third-graders, they would be in a state of shock," said Marilyn Huriwitz, a health teacher at South Boston High School. "How are you going to talk to kids that age about anal sex?" asks Al Wardell, a Chicago high school teacher and a gay activist. "I guess that's my teacher's prudishness." Young children's brains cannot assimilate...
Pragmatically, Koop might be well advised to abandon campaigning for vivid AIDS instruction in the third grade. The delay of a couple of years would not greatly undermine his overall goal. But the largest problem entwined in sex-ed courses cannot be so easily evaded or resolved. The subject is impossible to teach without plunging into the question of values. Many educators assert that curriculums can be made value free, a dubious idea at best...
...programs incorporating discussions of AIDS were already under way before Koop's report. Last spring, after a student and staff member in two public schools were diagnosed as having AIDS, Boston prepared a 28-minute AIDS videotape filled with medical facts but also polite circumlocutions, including the message that AIDS spreads through blood and semen and "intimate sexual contact." For Boston, that was a shift. "Look, ten years ago, you couldn't even mention intimate sexual contact in this town," says Michael Grady, medical director for the Boston public schools. Grady's defense of the vagueness: "We'd rather...