To the editor:

How many of you know how every part in your car’s engine works? Even if you did, do you think your driving skills would improve? Probably not. Safely operating a car has little to do with knowing exactly how everything happens under the hood. The same is true of the human body.

For the last 40 years, our society has been advocating an approach to sex education that focuses almost exclusively on biology. We teach kids way more than anyone could ever need to know about the human reproductive system. Just when you think there’s no more to learn, they get to college and we have to put warnings on the classes so they can learn all the things that were too obscene for their high school “sex training.”

What are the fruits of all this effort? Promiscuity, unplanned pregnancies, divorce, STDs, abortion, confused and broken lives. Auto mechanics don’t necessarily make good driver’s ed teachers. We have spent countless hours trying to educate people about how sex “works,” but in the process we have completely lost sight of what sex means.

If you really want to learn about sex, you need to go to the other end of Jayhawk Boulevard to the St. Lawrence Center and enroll in a class on the “Theology of the Body.” No obscene videos are shown; none are needed. The most outstanding educator of all time when it comes to human sexuality is not a KU employee, but an 83-year-old celibate man from Poland, John Paul II.

Shawn P. Tunink,

Lawrence