Open Sexame

U. S. high schools teach many things, but in most of them one subject is taboo --sex education. When Ellsworth B. Buck, a New York City School Commissioner, tried to break the taboo this year, he failed (TIME, Feb. 13). Last week the advocates of sex education tried again. This time they had the U. S. Government behind them.

The Federal Public Health Service and Office of Education jointly issued a manual for teachers called High Schools and Sex Education. It was written by famed free-lance Educator Benjamin C. Gruenberg and J. L. Kaukonen of the Public Health Service. A similar manual, written by Dr. Gruenberg in 1922, got nowhere, but Surgeon General Thomas Parran, encouraged by his recent success in killing another taboo--discussion of venereal disease--had high hopes for this new campaign. Said he: "Many people see sex dimly through a mist--dangerous, but mysteriously attractive. . . . Modern psychology and medicine . . . have shown over and over again the need for replacing taboos and ignorance by frank discussion and knowledge so that young people can attain healthy adulthood."

To the authors of High Schools and Sex Education, lectures by school physicians on elementary facts of animal life (such as many schools provide) are not sex education. They believe that adolescents are more troubled by emotional, psychological, social and spiritual questions about sex than by the physical facts. Consequently, they recommended that sex education be distributed throughout the curriculum--in biology, hygiene, physical education, science, history, literature courses.

They proposed, for example, that in hygiene classes pupils be taught how the sex impulse and its control affects the nervous system. In physical education courses they should learn 1) that direct sex experience is not necessary for health, 2) that adolescents can find other outlets for their energies. By frank discussion of literature (e.g., The Scarlet Letter, Idylls of the King), they may be enlightened about sex as a motive in general human conduct. Sex may raise its head in girls' home economics classes: "The teacher has an opportunity to bring up . . . the effects produced on the feelings by color and line . . . and the responsibilities involved in selecting and designing dress." The authors recommended that pupils and teachers discuss prostitution, masturbation, illegitimacy, divorce.

Because they believe that many of these subjects cannot be discussed by boys & girls together without embarrassment, the authors advised that they be taught separately, not in special classes but in courses such as physical education and home economics, where boys & girls are naturally separated.

Prime requirement for sex education, said Authors Gruenberg & Kaukonen, is that its teachers (preferably married) should have a balanced outlook on life, be optimistic, poised, sympathetic to young people's problems, of upright character. A teacher must also be able to see that sex is sometimes funny, must be able to use humor without vulgarity, must never le his pupils get the impression that they have heard more dirty jokes than he has.

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