Should Schools Teach About Love?

In this Harvard Education Letter article, Richard Weissbourd and Rebecca Givens Rolland (Harvard Graduate School of Education) say that schools need to do a better job preparing young people for adult love relationships. “Widespread failure in romantic love – divorce (which ends nearly half of all first marriages), constant marital conflict, and quieter marital misery or the inability to even form a relationship – has clear, high human costs,” they say. “The consequences of troubled relationships, including alcoholism, workaholism, and domestic abuse, as well as the legions of therapies, mediation, and legal settlements designed to handle relationship failures, take an exorbitant financial and emotional toll.” Freud believed that work and love are the two things that matter most in life, but our schools focus on preparation for work and spend almost no curriculum time on love. 

Shouldn’t parents be doing this? In theory, yes, but for a variety of reasons, few have this conversation with their children – not least because kids don’t want to hear advice from their parents about love, let alone sex. “This lack of modeling and conversation creates a dangerous vacuum,” say Weissbourd and Rolland. Kids learn about love from their peers, the Internet, songs, films, and television, complete with lots of misogyny, sexual harassment, pornography, and harmful myths and misconceptions – that love is “an intoxication, an obsessive attraction, that love is about fulfilling one’s needs, that deep, durable love is unmistakable and suddenly happens to you.” 

“Sex education is typically reduced to what’s called ‘disaster prevention’: how to avoid pregnancy or STDs,” continue Weissbourd and Rolland. “Making matters worse, sex or health education is typically taught by adults who have little or no training or support and are sometimes roped into it." 

What is to be done? Spread good programs like Alabama’s Love U2: Increasing Your Relationship Smarts and Boston University’s The Art of Loving Well, highlight positive marriages (like the one between two of the main characters in Friday Night Lights), study relationships in history and great works of literature, train teachers better, and consider adopting exemplary programs such as those used in Norway, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand.

“Learning About Love: How Schools Can Better Prepare Students for Romantic Relationships” by Richard Weissbourd and Rebecca Givens Rolland in Harvard Education Letter, March/April 2013 (Vol. 29, #2, p. 8, 6-7), www.edletter.org

From the Marshall Memo #476