It seems like everyday I find new reasons to want to send my own kids (when I have them) to private school one day. In a time when teachers aren’t adequately teaching kids the stuff they should learn (reading, writing, math, history, etc.) it’s hard to imagine why any parent would want their kid to go through sex ed in school.

But to me, there’s a bigger problem. Sexual education is no longer about the basics for sake of having the knowledge… there’s actual incidents where there’s a clear violation of parents’ rights and the sexualization and indoctrination of young kids.

IMAGINE you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?

That prospect would horrify most parents. But such lessons are part of a middle-school curriculum that Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, has recommended for his system’s newly mandated sex-education classes. There is a parental “opt out,” but it is very limited, covering classes on contraception and birth control.

Observers can quarrel about the extent to which what is being mandated is an effect, or a contributing cause, of the sexualization of children in our society at younger ages. But no one can plausibly claim that teaching middle-schoolers about mutual masturbation is “neutral” between competing views of morality; the idea of “value free” sex education was exploded as a myth long ago. The effect of such lessons is as much to promote a certain sexual ideology among the young as it is to protect their health.

So, what do the parents in our readership think? What do you about things like this. Is sex ed good or bad? Is it the job of the school (read: the government) to determine what your kids should and shouldn’t know about the facts of life?