Education Quote by Sue Johanson

Adult authority loves to confuse control with care, and Sue Johanson skewers that habit in one clean line. "We teach teens what we think they ought to know" is the voice of institutions: curriculum committees, health class worksheets, parents outsourcing awkward conversations to euphemism. The phrase "ought" does a lot of work here. It signals moral management, not curiosity. It implies there is a correct, approved set of facts that will produce compliant outcomes.

Then she twists the knife: "we never tell them what they want to know". The subtext is not that teens are shallow or prurient; it's that their questions are practical, immediate, and tied to risk. They want to know what consent feels like in real life, how to handle pressure, what to do when something goes wrong, whether their desires are normal, how bodies actually behave, how to get help without being punished for asking. Adults hear those questions as threats to innocence or authority, so they substitute abstraction and abstinence-era vagueness, the educational equivalent of hiding the owner's manual because the machine is "too powerful."

Johanson's context matters: she built a career translating sex education into plain speech, treating embarrassment as an obstacle, not a virtue. The line lands because it frames the failure as a mismatch of incentives. Adults teach to preserve reputations and values; teens learn to navigate reality. When those priorities diverge, ignorance isn't accidental - it's policy dressed up as protection.