SEX, IGNORANCE AND A HIGHSCOOL GRADUATE WALK INTO A BANK

I spent 5 years in high school. No. Not the customary 4 but 5. That is obviously a time consuming story so I will save it for my grandchildren in my ripe old age.  In those five years, I did not learn how to open a bank account. I still cringe when I have to use a deposit slip in the bank. I did not learn how to unroll a condom-its apparently harder than it looks? …ok I will stop there.  Write and email. (on an actual computer). I could be wrong but I doubt many of my female friends leant how to check for lumps in their breasts, or demand that their partners use protection.  I also never leant how to check for testicular cancer (If you are a man and you don’t know this stop reading and come back after you have googled it- same applies to ladies).

Good, now that we are back.  While I never learnt any of the above vital skills I gathered a ton of other knowledge. I know the gestation period of an elephant is 95 weeks - The textbooks used to say “the gestation of a female elephant is..’’ and I  would think, isorait, just incase anyone though it would be male. I can also successfully carry out a chemical titration. I can apply Pythagoras theory with my eyes closed and I know quite a bit about the Boyles Law and Avogadro’s constant (His real name is Amadeo, Romano Avagadro… just in case it crossed your mind).  Outside class, I figured out that smoking bang will likely make you insane and that drinking is evil.  I also learnt that sex is a sin and many girls indirectly learnt to be ashamed of their bodies since showing too much skin or being sexually aggressive was described as behavior befitting sex care providers in Nairobi’s red light district.

I learnt that mixing potassium with water results into an overly enthusiastic thermal reaction and combining sodium chloride with Sulphulic  acid results into a salt and some other stuff I don’t have time to Google right now.  The chemistry of never trying to mix beer with vodka never seemed to come up, until it did in an uncontrolled environment otherwise referred to as a club.  So our high schools release hapless students full of theories but little practical knowledge. In the words of Bill Bryson, they jump into experimentation with more enthusiasm than sense.

 They discover that Marijuana does not provide instant insanity and alcohol is either not so bad or their all knowing teachers and fathers wouldn’t be drinking it like it was going out of fashion.  Many cannot manage their money because they were never offered any financial literacy classes and consequently drink their collage loan money like there is no tomorrow and turn to beggars for the remainder of the semester. They discover that having sex doesn’t turn you into a pillar of salt. Sometimes, they only discover that the “central pillar” should be prophylactically sheathed during sex after they have recovered from a nasty rash.

Girls are pressured into guilty sex since the minute they strip naked they are so vulnerable believing what their body is tantalizing them to do is evil and dirty. How can they not while their mothers and pastors (fathers never seem to know this things) have been telling them that showing a boy your nakedness is the first staircase on the way to moral or “church” damnation. When the guy says. “Condoms take away all the fun babe” they are too embarrassed to argue and they want him to hold her and stop looking at her shame.  Nasty rash season 2 or an attack of the pregnants is usually a harsh eye opener. In many cases, coat hanger back street abortion quack/doctors are called into play. (The coat hanger is not necessarily a figure of speech). The boy who secretly attended vanishing into thin air 101 will make his teacher proud.

Both genders discover alcohol in their late teens they consume it with the gusto of MCAs embezzling El Nino disaster preparedness funds.  They have to learn through experience that while drinking a beer every other day will not turn you into an alcoholic (it might). Making it a habit to drink hard liquor everyday because it’s the only way you can afford to get drunk on your half shoestring budget is a slope that can only get more slippery. They learnt the morality of ethanol and the process of fermenting beer (Some tried it in the dorm with handfuls of yeast smuggled from the lab- you know yourselves). However, no one thought to tell them that wine has an alcohol content of 7 to 17% ethanol and Vodka anything above 41% and that drinking alcohol from questionable places could result in methanol poisoning.  At least no-one told me that. I wonder what would have happened if some idiot had had me on a dare to down a bottle of Second generation liquor when I was 19. Why? Because they are not supposed to drink, or have sex for that matter. When they discover that bang does not drive them to the nearest mental hospital, they reasonably assume that their teachers lied about cocaine and heroin as well. From this mind blowing epiphany (there must be a pun in there somewhere), it’s usually a short trip to rehab or a grave even worse, a life of dazed zombihood.  

Why our teachers will not tell kids that drug A is more harmful than drug B and drinking in moderation is not the same as sloshing one’s self like they have reached the vat at the end of the rainbow? They either don’t know or think the “better” drug will appear appealing to the kids. They may also think that telling kids about drinking in moderation will make them want to try it after school. The same argument is given for not having sex education or condoms in schools. It is going to encourage kids to have sex.  Evidently, the surge of unwanted pregnancies and STD infections is proof of how successful this ignorance has been.  The whole point of this not so short episode of pontification is that children need sex education; they also need alcohol and drugs education.

 Ignorance is only bliss if you are too stupid to know you are ignorant. Little knowledge on the other hand is supremely dangerous.