New York City, September 20, 2000/Researchers at the Institute for American Values today released a major report calling for a new and better model of marriage education in junior and senior high schools. "A new generation of school-based marriage education curricula should expand its vision of what marriage is and what marriage education can be," says David Blankenhorn, President of the Institute for American Values. Good marriage education would balance relationship and communication skills with scientifically valid information on the benefits of marriage, and use the power of stories to help students explore the larger meaning of love, courtship, and marriage as a shared ideal and social institution.

In Hungry Hearts: Evaluating the New High School Curricula on Marriage and Relationships, principal investigator Dana Mack evaluates ten of the new marriage and relationships skills curricula currently used in junior and senior high schools.

While students have long "studied subjects at least indirectly related to marriage, such as home economics, life management, family and consumer sciences, health, sex education, and (more recently) abstinence education," the study points out, direct instruction about marriage is a relatively new phenomenon, spurred in part by public concern about the high public and personal costs of fatherlessness and family fragmentation. The goal of school-based marriage education, as Diane Sollee of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education describes it in this report is "to help young people become part of a marriage renaissance built on new knowledge and new optimism. . .We can continue our current approach of telling young people that marriage is important and for life, but that half are going to fail. Or we can equip them to succeed."

Based on interviews with marriage educators, public school officials and curriculum publishers, the report estimates that about 2000 schools in 50 states offer formal instruction on marriage and relationship skills and "this number is growing." Marriage education in schools appears to be most prevalent in Florida, Utah, Minnesota, California, South Dakota, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. Since 1998 Florida has mandated "marriage and relationship skills" education for all high school students.

Three of the ten curricula evaluated, according to Hungry Hearts, "contained a sustained marriage focus, affirmed the benefits of marriage, and also came closer than the others to offering diverse types of knowledge about marriage in an age-appropriate fashion." The best of current marriage education curricula are: Connections: Relationships and Marriage; RQ: Relationship Intelligence, and The Art of Loving Well.

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