In fifth grade, when you knew the sex education unit was coming, you thought you knew it all. In 10th grade, when you had to take health class, you thought you really knew it all.

Now you’re in college, and you really do know all there is to know about sex. Why should you think differently? Most of those classes you did take offered little new or useful information. Your parents probably didn’t elaborate too much either, and it’s doubtful your place of worship did much of anything in the way of sex education. It’s easy to pick it up from your buddies and a few semi-educational porno tapes, right?

It’s easy to roam the earth, get laid occasionally, grow old and die all while thinking you know what you need to know about sex.

What that high school health course did harp on, however, was protecting yourself from sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancy. Your teachers probably told you on many occasions that the only 100 percent sure way to avoid pregnancy and STIs was abstinence.

They weren’t wrong, necessarily; they just had some interesting motivations for telling it the way they did – namely some federal bling-bling.

Religious interests have whipped the government into providing schools with some financial incentives for teaching what’s termed “abstinence-based” sex education. Legislators think they’re saving money in the long run by keeping your pants on, so they don’t have to comp you for Valtrex and diapers.

The problem with this style of sex education is that it relies heavily on scare tactics and is itself afraid of revealing too much. You probably remember some of the gory slides of STIs. Here’s a little newsflash: most of them don’t have noticeable symptoms in most people. Herpes and genital warts may not be curable, but they are treatable; they don’t just fester into little forests on your privates unless you let them.

That’s not to say you should feel free to get infected and infect at will. Certainly AIDS is a force to be reckoned with. But those slides are an unrealistic representation of what STIs really are and mislead people to believe they’ll always be able to tell if they have one. And as scary as they were, they didn’t stop you from having sex, did they?

The same abstinence-based education that showed you those STIs didn’t do much in the way of telling you how to protect yourself from them. Maybe they forget to mention that different diseases are spread different ways. Herpes is spread through skin-to-skin contact; HIV relies more on transfer of fluid. Maybe they didn’t add that many diseases can be transmitted during oral sex or just fooling around naked. Maybe they didn’t say a blessed thing about homosexual sex.

Maybe they passed around some contraceptives, like cervical caps, condoms and diaphragms. But did they tell you what kind of lubricant to use to keep the condoms from breaking? Did they tell you where you can go to get birth control pills and condoms cheap, like Planned Parenthood or your county health department?

The fact is, whether or not people are ever taught all the ins and outs of doing the deed, they’re going to do it. And they’ll do it in ways and places and combinations that your teachers, legislators and religious leaders never imagined.

Educating teenagers on sex before they start having it means a comprehensive effort from not just school and family, but also religion, from which many people draw their sexual values.

Sending young adults into a sexually revolutionized world with about one-tenth of the knowledge they need isn’t going to curb the AIDS epidemic or stem unplanned pregnancies. The ignorance will cost everyone more in the long run.