ON TEACHING CHILDREN ABOUT SEX

"SILENCE is criminal. We must teach these facts and teach them right, so that knowledge may lead to purity and righteousness. But with the new awakening and discussion of sex matters, the pendulum has swung from silence to publicity that is almost nauseating." So said E. K. Mohr, superintendent of the purity department of the International Sunday School Association. The remarkable thing is that he said it in 1914. The pendulum continued to swing beyond anything Mr. Mohr or his purity department could have foreseen. What was then a pioneering stand for frankness has become virtually commonplace, and what was then upsetting delicate souls or stomachs is now casually discussed in the classroom.

The change was gradual until three to four years ago. Since then, sex education in the schools has moved forward at startling speed. Experts estimate that two years from now, 70% of the nation's schools will have broad, thorough sex-education programs. Progress has been so fast that it is creating problems: a shortage of qualified teachers and great uncertainty about what form instruction should take.

By no means has all opposition disappeared. Sex education is still suspect in many parts of the country, and often severely limited. Many teachers are still afraid of getting into trouble with trustees or families. Some schools require the parents' written consent before children may attend the classes or lectures. But school systems with a diversity of religious groupings are launching experimental programs. New York City's begins next September, Chicago's started last winter, and 400-odd others are under way. This year, for the first time, the Federal Government is awarding two grants specifically in the field, to help plan model courses in Bedford, Mass., and New Orleans. Even the Roman Catholic Church, which hitherto has given the subject a wide berth, is taking the plunge. The New York Archdiocese has prepared a "Program of Family Life Education" for its 400 parishes. Catholic-run Fordham University will offer next September a series of lectures and discussions about sex in all its nonpathological aspects. Organizations devoted to the spread of sex education are swamped with requests for help in designing courses. Says Curtis Avery, professor of education at the University of Oregon: "Sex education apparently no longer must be sold; it has been bought." Mostly it has been bought by the parents themselves, who are virtually besieging the schools to take on the job. Who

It is a strange phenomenon. In many traditional societies, youth's initiation into the mysteries of sex and life is the awesome duty of family or tribe. Yet in the West, and particularly in Puritan America, parents rarely perform a major conscious role in this respect--although their unconscious attitudes profoundly influence their children. Parents are apt to feel strained, embarrassed, inadequate to the task. Many psychiatrists agree that parents are too often beset by their own sexual problems or guilt feelings to make good sex teachers. They can hardly imagine their children as anything but innocent, while the children can hardly imagine their parents engaged in sexual intercourse. Urbanization deprives children of what used to be learned through simple observation on the farm; middle-class life often keeps them from the rough-and-ready expertise "picked up in the gutter." Given the alarming statistics about rising venereal-disease rates and unwed teen-age pregnancies, it is no wonder that parents increasingly feel that they cannot cope with the situation and turn to the school for help.

Teachers, of course, are not free of sexual problems and prejudices, either: while psychiatric folklore is full of case histories of complexes and inhibitions acquired in the home, no one has any idea about what psychological problems may be created in the classroom. Still, a reasonably well-prepared and well-balanced teacher can usually explain things in an atmosphere less emotionally charged than that found in the home. The big questions in class are when children are to be taught, how and with what aim.

What goes by the name of sex education--or the popular euphemism "family living"--covers a wide range. For boys, it may simply be a session in the gym conducted by the coach and consisting of little more than health hints or superficial biology. For girls, it may be what one educator impatiently calls the "rainy-day phys-ed-movie bit"--frequently Walt Disney's well-worn Story of Menstruation. Only fairly general physiology is taught even in more ambitious programs--known to professionals as "plumbing courses." By modern standards, such courses are hardly considered sex education at all. The new insistence is on dealing with every facet of sex: biological, emotional, sociological.

When

Most authorities agree that sex education should start early. The superintendent of schools in the New York City suburb of Glen Cove, where sex education begins in kindergarten, reports that he has received 800 requests from other school systems and church groups for a pamphlet describing the program. Glen Cove kindergartners discuss the coming of a new baby into the family group. "We make it clear that the baby was not 'got' at the hospital, but grew inside the mother until the doctor helped it get out," says Glen Cove's Mrs. Rose Daniels, sex-education consultant to the classroom instructors. Mrs. Daniels' kindergartens also incubate hen's eggs--the use of such animals as hamsters and gerbils can be unfortunate, since they sometimes eat their young. To brief her five-year-olds on the principal anatomical discrepancy between boys and girls, Mrs. Daniels conducts a bisexual expedition into the school men's room to give them a clue from the urinals--though purists in sex education frown on any association of elimination with sex.

Some experts would start sex instruction even before kindergarten. This view is shared by Dr. Mary S. Calderone, executive director of the Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. and a pioneer of sex education. At the age of three, she thinks, children should begin learning in simple, direct language about the sperm uniting with the egg in the uterus, carried there by the father's penis entering the mother's vagina. She has no patience with talk about the father's "placing" the seed in the mother. "This is a passive description and in fact is not what happens," she complains. "The sexual relationship has a tremendous emotional content; it is ongoing and lasts through marriage, and once in a while a particular act results in a baby. If you tell five-year-olds that this is the way fathers and mothers affirm their love for each other and that they can choose when they will have a baby, you are teaching responsible parenthood, responsible sexuality."

In some respects, Dr. Calderone is far ahead of the field. There is almost complete professional agreement that straight, frank answers should be given even to very young children, but many psychologists believe that too much detail too soon only produces confusion and anxiety. Most courses are programmed to give information gradually.

In the school system of Washington, D.C., for instance, first-and second-graders learn about their bodies, third-graders study breast feeding. Not until the fifth and sixth grades does the course take up menstruation and reproduction. In Anaheim, Calif., whose program is considered one of the best in the U.S., instruction begins in the seventh grade, covering parent-child and sibling conflicts, physical changes in adolescence, and masturbation. The eighth grade takes up more physical changes, "problem-solving techniques" and dating. The ninth grade discusses going steady and premarital intercourse. The tenth grade deals with engagement and readiness for marriage. Eleventh-graders take up sexual relations in marriage and the causes and effects of divorce, and the twelfth grade continues with the adjustments necessary in having children. Like most sex-education courses, to the chagrin of some critics, the Anaheim program avoids talking about contraception and sex techniques.

How

The teachers at Anaheim permit classroom use of four-letter words in order to strip them of their forbidden-thrill value. But most of the time, the language in the more advanced sex-education classes is straightforward and clinical, with the result that parents are sometimes staggered by breakfast-table mentions of seminal emissions or clitoral excitation. However startling, such language is a vast improvement over the flights of icky imagery about the "mystery of growth" and the "joyous miracle of motherhood" that can still be heard from time to time.

In the classroom, teachers try to make the subject matter as specific as possible--especially in the elementary grades, where they commonly assign children to model the male and female genitals in clay or make drawings of them and their workings. Some instructors use plastic manikins from which the exterior genitals can be removed to reveal the apparatus within. One sex educator in Detroit demonstrates the stretching of the uterus with a rubber ball inside a sock, and the growth of the human embryo by soaking beans in water until they swell and sprout. Teachers get much help from movies in schools that can afford them. From the fairly tame animal films on the kindergarten level, they range to Human Reproduction, featuring body models with all organs clearly labeled; Phoebe, the story of a lovely girl and what happens to her when she becomes pregnant; Fertility and Birth, a cartoon depicting sexual intercourse and subsequent hospital delivery, which is supposed to be used only in "emergencies," meaning when children specifically ask about fertilization.

The amount of mythology and misinformation that teachers encounter is considerable, even among the apparently sophisticated. After decades of reassurance, boys are still concerned about the putative effects of masturbation: does it really cause baldness, blindness, mental retardation, physical debility, or hairy palms? The relief at learning that none of these is true can be profound. Says a 13-year-old New Yorker: "When you find out that every other guy in the class does it and it's not all that unhealthy, you don't feel so bad any more." Homosexuality is currently a major concern of youngsters of both sexes, though most programs try to postpone extended treatment of the seamy side of sex--VD, abortion, perversion--until a positive image has been established in the youngster's mind. Girls tend to worry about the risk of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth ("Can't we just adopt a baby?" they often ask).

Probably the toughest question about sex education is whether it should be straight information or have moral direction. "Adults sure have different goals," observed one New York teen-ager in a recent survey. "They don't look at sex education as teaching us to understand sex. They look at it as a way of controlling our morals." And a lot of them do. Says Anaheim School Superintendent Paul Cook: "As soon as you start to lecture the kids, they turn you off. They just won't listen to people telling them what to do. We try to just give them the objective facts and tell them the decision is up to them."

The "objective facts" include consequences. Despite Superintendent Cook's well-taken strictures against moralizing, the shapers of the Anaheim program were obviously interested in morality and social values. Cook, who used to teach the course himself, tells how it tries to prepare both sexes for the "traps" of dating. The message to the boys is that they need not make a pass at a girl to prove themselves masculine, and to the girls that they need not say yes to remain popular. Says Cook: "We try to give them answers for all the old con games." Without explicit moralizing, the course relies heavily on cautionary tales about venereal disease and the consequences of unwanted pregnancies. A typical deterrent story concerns a boy who could not go to college and had to become a garage mechanic instead to support his baby. Says an observer of the Anaheim program: "The implicit moral is 'If you play, you'll pay.' There is no talk of hell fire and damnation, of course, only of the various kinds of social hell that can happen if you are not careful."

In short, most sex education tries to perpetuate by enlightened sweet reasonableness the same morality that was once enforceable by social or religious canon and parental fiat. It does not necessarily work. Family Life Professor Lester Allen Kirkendall of Oregon State, who has been working on sex education since 1928, decries the tendency of parents to look on sex education as "disaster insurance." The old threats of pregnancy, venereal disease and community disapproval no longer carry the weight they once did, according to Kirkendall. "Many parents still think we can revitalize these threats," he says, "but the kids don't scare any more." It would be more practical, Kirkendall thinks, to teach them contraception. The solution may not be that simple. Some psychiatrists hold that premarital pregnancy, at least, is often due to factors other than ignorance. Psychologist Dr. Rhoda Lorand cites such causes as "the desire to spite the parents, a need for a baby all her own, a desperately lonely girl seeking signs of affection."

Why

There is a growing suspicion that too much may be expected of sex education and that the programs, no matter how sound, are asked to provide solutions to moral problems that are really part of the society. Today's adolescents, Dr. Calderone points out, are without the defenses that once shielded the young. "The adults," she says, "have allowed all the protective barriers to go down. We have done away with chaperons, supervision, rules, close family relations, and privacy from the intrusion of the communications media. We have left our children totally vulnerable to the onslaughts of the commercial exploitation of sex, tabloid reporting of sordid sexual occurrences, wholly unsupervised after-school occupations. To fill the void left by the old safeguards, youngsters must be given a bulwark of factual knowledge and orientation."

The problem of also giving them a sense of morality is either relatively uncomplicated or well-nigh impossible, depending on what one means by morality. What many designers of sex-education courses have in mind is "situation ethics." Its tenets are well expressed by Dr. Alan Guttmacher, veteran fighter for planned parenthood. "I think all we ask of our young generation," he recently told a Manhattan audience of 10th-and 12th-graders, "is a feeling of sexual responsibility. Don't enter premarital sex lightly. Enter it after deep and searching thought. If in doubt--don't. You have to make a decision on the basis of your own values. If you feel it is wrong, it would be bad for you to try it. And you must not exploit a sexual partner. This is gross immorality. Premarital sex should be entered into as a faithful episode. You choose your mate carefully and remain faithful at the time. But please, you must use effective controls. There is too much trauma in a premarital pregnancy to the girl, the boy, the parents, the unborn child."

To most parents, such advice, however realistic, will still sound alarming. It seems to translate easily into an all-too-simple rule: "Premarital sex is all right if you are in love and faithful--for a while. And if you can't be good, be careful." Even aside from traditional questions of right or wrong, virtue or sin, this seems to place an inordinately heavy burden of decision and judgment on the young.

On the other hand, it must be admitted that this formula does sum up the principles--often the only principles--that many young people in fact try to follow. Parents who feel that these principles are inadequate cannot and should not look to the schools for decisive help. They will have to redefine or reassert their own morality in the home and in society at large. And that will take a great deal more than sex education, or education of any kind.

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