Moral can be defined loosely as "of good character". Values are "a belief, or standard". The question at hand is, has sex eroded moral values? Sex is everywhere. It is not limited to the bedroom anymore, but to the television, movies, billboards, office buildings and the White House. The open discussion and study of sex dates back only about a century, to the work of Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that sexuality was innate, present in humans at birth. Freud lived at a time when sexuality was considered unsavory, and was avoided in all polite conversation and social interaction. His breakthrough thinking affected social practices as well as therapeutic ones. In Freud's own era, the "moral fog that had enshrouded sexuality for most of the nineteenth century did not begin to lift until after the First World War" (Janus, 11).
             Where do we get our morals and values? Character education was what took place in school and society in the past. It was sometimes heavy-handed and always liable to abuse, but it seemed to serve our culture well over a long period of time. But what we have now, for the most part, is the "decision-making approach" (Kilpatrick, 16). In one form or another, sometimes as a course in itself, sometimes as a strategy in sex education classes, sometimes as a unit in civics or social sciences, it has set the tone for moral education in public and even private schools. "The shift from character education to the decision-making model was begun with the best of intentions. The new approach was meant to help students to think more independently and critically about values" (Kilpatric,16). Proponents claimed that a young person would be more committed to self-discovered values than to ones that were simply handed down by adults. That was the hope, but the actual consequences of the shift have been quite different. For students, it has meant wholesale confusion about moral values: learning to question value...