Student

In the culture war between the religious right and the secular left, much of the fighting centers around sex education. Appearing ubiquitously in various media outlets and academic commentary,' both sides advance familiar arguments. The religious right contends that to protect teenagers from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), public high schools must encourage students to abstain from sexual activity.' In contrast, the secular left claims that because young people will have sex regardless of whether schools teach them sexual abstinence, public high schools must teach teenagers how to engage in safe sex.3 What many Americans may not know is that in some places the dispute about how to teach sex education is not yet relevant because the public schools have not answered the threshold question of whether to teach sex education. This article addresses this threshold question.
Most state legislatures do not require any of their public schools to teach sex education,4 opting instead to leave the decision entirely to the local school boards. Exercising this discretion granted from their state legislatures, some public schools choose not to teach sex education. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 15.2% of public high schools and 30.9% of public junior high schools do not require any STD prevention education, including abstinence sex education.5 Although some confusion exists as to precisely how many teenagers do not receive any formal sex education, evidence suggests that because a significant percentage of public schools are not teaching any sex education, many teenagers receive no formal sex education at all.6 Whatever the actual numbers, the problem is that some teenagers become adults without formally learning anything about STDs and pregnancy. These people are the forgotten soldiers in the culture war over sex education.
That some people go through public education without receiving any sex education is both