School once was typified by an apple on the teacher’s desk — now a better symbol is the forbidden fruit. A recent case in point is a Texas high-school teacher who did drugs and had sexual relations with a 15-year-old boy. Also in the news (though an older story) is a sixth-grade Arizona teacher who engaged in sexual activity with a 13-year-old male student. They’re just two of the latest cases in the government-school sex scandal — which a federally funded study found is 100 times the magnitude of the Catholic Church scandal.

The Texas case involved former Cypress Springs High School teacher Michelle Schiffer, 23, who just pled guilty “to one charge of improper relationship with a student,” reports Chron.com. Schiffer met with the teen twice, smoking marijuana with him the second time and having relations on both occasions.

The Arizona trespass involves Brittany Zamora, 27, a former sixth-grade teacher at Las Brisas Academy Elementary School in Goodyear. Zamora, who is married, exchanged naked photos with the 13-year-old student and had various kinds of sexual relations with him on multiple occasions. She reportedly initiated the contact by “flirting” with the boy in a classroom chat group and sent him messages stating “I want you every day with no time limit” and “If I could quit my job and (have se`x with) you all day long, I would.” She has pled not guilty, and her case is currently being adjudicated.

Yet these teachers’ names and their trespasses’ sordid details, though titillating to many, are unimportant. Significant is that they’re part of a larger problem, one defined well by Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft. As LifeSiteNews.com reported in 2010, “Shakeshaft, the researcher of a little-remembered 2004 study prepared for the U.S. Department of Education, [found that] ‘the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.’ According to the 2004 study ‘the most accurate data available at this time’ indicates that ‘nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.’” Note that this scandal has never been sufficiently addressed — and thus the abuse continues.

The anecdotal evidence aligns with this, too, as this CBS News Crimesider page presenting 63 “Notorious teacher sex scandals” illustrates. But what’s going on? Why is Sodom now in the schoolhouse?

To be clear, as any scoffer will note, sexual misconduct with children is nothing new. In 2008, for instance, perpetually tanned actor George Hamilton revealed that his stepmother seduced him when he was just 12 (this was in the early ‘50s). Yet it would be naïve to think that such behavior isn’t more prevalent today — especially in schools.

The simplest reason why is, of course, the Sexual “Devolution.” There was a time when the explicit standard was that sex must be confined to marriage; in fact, many viewed it as sacred, part of God’s plan for humanity. Yet today it’s often considered merely a pleasurable physical act. This makes sense, too, in a secular age. After all, if there were no God, nothing beyond this material fold, then the material would be all there is. And what but a physical act could sex be in a purely physical world?

This reduces it to merely a source of pleasure, much like eating ice cream. And note that it’s treated precisely that way: Increasingly, concerns about sex revolve not around moral dangers but physical ones. Eat what you want, just avoid heart disease; have whatever sex you want, just avoid venereal disease. Stay physically healthy and, whatever you do, don’t burden the healthcare system, and you’ve cleared the bar, bucko.

Really, teacher sexual predation should be no surprise. People today are inundated with sexual messages and images via media, entertainment, and academia; and everything is allowable, from fornication to cohabitation to homosexuality to choosing your “gender.” Young children are given sex (mis)education, with the message being “We know you’re going to ‘do it,’ and here’s how it’s done — so you don’t harm your health.” And even pedophilia is slowly being legitimized, with researchers calling it just another inborn “orientation.” In sum, our credo has become “If it feels good, do it.” Then we’re surprised when teachers and highly sexualized kids do what feels good.

In contrast, sex was very cut and dried when confined to marriage. But once removed from that context, where do you draw the line? When you’re “ready” for sex, they say. Well, the nature of youth is to believe you’re ready for all sorts of things you’re not.

Speaking of maturity, striking about these teacher sex-abuse cases is how the adults will exchange lascivious electronic messages with the kids, thus leaving, essentially, a paper trail. This, not to mention that teen boys will talk and boast — and talk and talk and boast and boast and get high fives. Don’t the teachers know it’s a recipe for disaster?

Part of the explanation is that these teachers are immature themselves. While children centuries ago often had to assume adult responsibilities, today’s world stunts people’s moral, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual development. The result is 20-something and even 30-something individuals talking about how they must “find themselves.” Immature, overgrown adolescents in adult bodies, is it any surprise they gravitate toward adolescents in romance?

For a case in point, listen to a recording (video below) of ex-teacher Debra Lafave, who had sexual relations with a 14-year-old in 2004, and ask yourself if the boy doesn’t sound more mature than she does (relevant portion begins at 4:51). As Fox News put it, Lafave was “speaking in a childish voice.”

But there’s enough childishness to go around. A common response from men under articles about these misconduct cases is, “Where were these teachers when I was 13!” These fellows often scoff at the charges, saying that the boy was happy to comply and that every guy dreams of such conquests.

And they have a point — but they also miss one.

Teen boys do have robust libidos (this is related to testosterone level, highest between the ages of 14 and 17), and their temptation is great. Yet a child may also eat sweets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if you let him. That’s why adults exist. It’s their role to establish boundaries.

As for the men looking back and remembering how willing they’d have been, they should ponder Edna St. Vincent Millay’s line, “Pity me that the heart is slow to learn What the swift mind beholds at every turn.” However one feels emotionally, a mature intellect intervenes and understands that the “heart is deceitful above all things.”

Really, though, the sexual abuse itself is not the biggest problem reflected in this story. The greater one is that large numbers of teachers with a libertine and leftist mindset infest government schools. Not all of them physically molest students, and those who do target only a few. But these teachers, with their corruptive world view, molest the minds of all students. To ignore this, or fancy it a lesser trespass, would be to commit that secular error of troubling only over the physical.

It’s yet another good reason why today’s government schools are hazardous to your child’s health.

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