Oh! Sex Education!

...Sadly but valiantly, they prepared to face and defeat the legions of ignorance and "hate" that so shockingly had risen up against their disinterested efforts at enlightenment...

...That the mass media lent their support goes without saying...

...To take only one example: Paul Cook, the "heroic," beleaguered Superintendant of Schools in Anaheim, replied to the question, would such courses encourage pre-marital sex: "No...

...To begin with, according to Dr...

...the issue of parental rights, and the whole question of the role of government in molding social values...

...There is a strange (libido-fed...

...The claim that tribute must be levied on the producers of real goods and services in order to fund such stuff is to my mind another one of those ideas that are genuinely puzzling, because they are nearly universally accepted among educated people and yet so obviously false - like that Gore Vidal has a dazzlingly beautiful prose style, or that Galbraith is a witty man...

...and self-righteously slaying the dragon of "Puritanism," while all the time propagating their own more insidious form of it...

...Their idea that the "golden moments" of sex were something to be "earned...

...Calderone's language in discussing the issue "clearly betrayed a deeply Calvinist view of sex" (Dr...

...by Mary Breasted Praeger, $7.95 As everyone knows, a person who is against sex education in the public schools is typically a sputtering, stammering fanatic, who showers with a bathing suit on, and in whom the very mention of "sex" is apt to trigger whole systems of facial tics...

...As in most cases where government is called on to furnish what is thought to be a public need, one easily makes the mistake of visualizing how the program once set up will in fact function given theoretically ideal circumstances and personnel, instead of things as they actually are...

...The pro-sex education forces are the ones that are sociologically much more significant...

...In exposing these values, hidden behind the allegedly value-free aim of providing students with the "facts," Miss Breasted turns the left flank of the sex educationists and gives the libertarian the satisfaction of taking the measure of their vaunted sexual "progessivism...

...This victory frightened sex education forces around the country (principally in the form of SIECUS - the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States), who had for a number of years been quietly propagandizing and lobbying to the point where, at the end of 1969, probably over half of the nation's public schools had such courses...

...Even if there were no constitutional problem, it would still be improper for the state to impose religiously oriented courses on students...

...It is perfectly analogous to struggles between Catholics and Protestants in the days when the state intervened in religious matters...

...Consider the fact that, as the author points out, almost no proponent of sex education would favor a plan whereby such courses were made available to parents, who then could pass on the "basic information" to their children, but adding their own value judgments (such courses could offer "the findings of modern research," to lessen the implied stigma of ignorance in a parent attending such a course...

...It does not occur to her that the very existence of a controversy over sex education is due to the fact that the government owns and operates schools...

...warnings about "socialists," Communists, and their "signs," are all, I suppose, rather terrifying to someone who comes face to face with that sort of mentality for the first time...

...Mary Calderone...

...Is it barely possible that an intelligent, humane person, concerned with the welfare of young people arid the dignity and self-determination of society at large, could reasonably reject the indoctrination of school children with the public school teachers' idea of "mature" and "constructive" sexual conduct...

...this makes what would otherwise be an ordinary cultural question (like whether women should wear miniskirts or people should engage in group sex) into a political question, where contending sides struggle for control of the state apparatus...

...in any case, frightening or entertaining, such views do not characterize those who really run the country...

...It is the same with sex education, and for the same reason: it is just not the business of the state and its educational bureaucrats to undertake the molding of social values...

...It might be that such assertions are part of a Machiavellian attempt to pacify the Antis...

...On the contrary, the discussion of the hazards of premarital sex activities tends to develop the understanding and awareness young people need to manage their physical desires....We encourage continence and we provide the children with sound, logical, and understandable reasons why premarital sex is a dangerous and self-defeating activity...

...It was almost entirely "devoted to lessons in problem-solving within the context of the conventional morality...

...She begins by discussing in detail the struggle over the Family Life and Sex Education course in the junior and senior high schools of Anaheim, California, culminating in the victory of the Antis in the school board election of April, 1969...

...Gushy liberal types "training hordes of future Ann Landers (or, at best, David Reubens), reinforcing in them all the current cant one has heard a million iimes over against "materialism" and for "relating to people as people...

...As the principle applies in this case: that young people should become sexually less inhibited may be a good thing (in my view, it is...

...This was a position the author encountered again and again among the Pros...

...But, as the author states, what "haunted" her, liberal as she was, as she observed the sex educationists close up, was the very question that the Antis had raised so often: "Who gave these people the right to tell us how to raise our children...

...If state education were abolished, parents and children would decide for themselves, individually, by their choice of schools whether to submit to formal sex education and, if so, of what sort...

...Calderone herself is a Quaker), and she "advocated a sex education that was basically a form of moral indoctrination...

...Most of them will be the graduates of the teachers colleges in the various states...

...To Miss Breasted's mind, Dr...

...But, not only is that not the intention of the sex educators things as they really are dictate that sex education in the public schools will, as a practical matter, be carried out by middle-class and lower middle-class individuals, with their own inevitable and distinctive limitations and nervousness on the subject...

...She attended a class at Long Beach State College, aimed at forming the sex educators of tomorrow: "Interpreting the lyrics of Youth Culture, offering the definitions for 'climacteric' and 'frot-tage,' expounding your own private theories about the modern striver or the varieties of rape...

...But might it after all be the case that one can oppose tax-supported sex education without also having favored bombing Haiphong or supporting the mandatory death penalty for possession of marijuana...

...In fact, everything that is enlightened, everything that is humane, everything that sets the tone in America, is in favor of sex education...

...of such fragments was the sex education class for the future 'Family Life' teachers molded together...

...the Director of and prime mover in SIECUS, the organization was started at a conference held in Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1961, the proceedings of which were published in a book titled, significantly, Foundations for a Christian Family Policy...

...For many of them, the situation must have all the makings of a nightmare: a group of government employees, utilizing compulsory school attendance laws and the parents' own money, presumes to interpose itself between the parents and their children, in order to correct "backward" and "archaic" sexual attitudes...

...In addition, it is a known fact that opposition to sex education correlates very highly with opposition to flouridation of water, the refusal to accept Federal Reserves notes as legal tender, and the belief that one's internal organs are under the control or the Communists...

...The author, Mary Breasted, has quite good liberal credentials, as these things go in journalism...

...The most illuminating parts of the book consist in Miss Breasted's analysis of the character and motives of those on the two sides of the controversy, which she bases largely on interviews and personal observation, as well as on their published work...

...I myself consider such fantasies more or less high camp...

...their constant invocation, in true YMCA fashion, of illegitimacy and venereal disease as excuses for imparting knowledge about sex...

...The major revelation of this book is that, ironically, everyone - foes and mass-supporters of sex education alike seems to have misunderstood the real intentions of the people behind the idea...

...Isn't it obvious that the Pros don't trust the parents, that they think it necessary to balance and counter parental influence on this question...

...It is here that we find the grain of truth in the conventional wisdom-Playboy Forum view of the problems, discussed earlier...

...But it is only human then that the Antis' intuition of this should produce a sometimes wild and reckless counterattack...

...She is one of the few reporters for the Voice who looks outward and not inward when she is covering a story...

...Finally, it is ironic that at a time when intelligent radicals like Ivan Illich are arguing that we must put an end to the delirium of more and more "education" and begin to "de-school society," the prevailing view has come to be that even sex must be made the subject of formal, institutionalized learning...

...Moreover, her book shows her to be unusually intelligent and sensitive, and of an attractive cast of mind...

...Sometimes, when it came down to cases, according to the author, the "humanity" was manifested in odd ways: the readiness, even eagerness, of some sex educators to embarrass reluctant pupils in the classroom to the point of mortification, perplexed the author, and aroused her suspicions...

...That the conscious intention of the sex educationists is to by-pass the parents seems clear, and thus the hysteria the Antis sometimes show is more comprehensible...

...talking of "meaningful" relationships in terms that render all human relationships unreal and meaningless...

...But, as indicated at the beginning, the propriety of sex education courses has become axiomatic, to the point where the very possibility of rational opposition is ruled out a priori...

...But that is just the point, since here "the streets" means: in the midst of living life...

...A graduate of Radcliffe and of the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University, she is currently a reporter for The Village Voice...

...Stories of a "Satanic" plot linking SIECUS and the ADA...

...Given her background, it was natural that she began her investigations with something like the stereotype outlined above, and much of the interest of her book consists in observing how empirical reality broke through the confines of her preconceptions...

...The present book provides the opportunity for an assessment of the controversy...

...Given this, it is possible to forgive the Antis their occasional silly fantasies and Birchite nastiness...

...It may be, in other words, that they will react to the sex educationists much as the youth of Eastern Europe react to the paid purveyors of Marxism-Leninism in the state-owned schools there: by comparing what they are taught with reality as they experience and know it, they will end by simply shrugging their shoulders at the absurdity and irrelevance of the official line...

...The director of the Anaheim program was a certain Sally Williams, a school nurse...

...There is, however, a hopeful note...

...It may be, as the author tends to believe, that the whole issue is "academic" for young people, that they will not be much influenced in their ultimate attitudes and conduct either by the Antis or the Pros...

...Ralph Raico...

...Why the American people should be taxed to subsidize the propagation of such notions it is impossible to say...

...In point of fact, the orientation of the sex educationists (as shown, for instance, in the Family Life program at Anaheim) was towards instilling in the students a Consciousness II morality - in the sense of Charles Reich - different from Consciousness I, but still hardly "liberated" or "emancipated...

...Two issues of theoretical interest, however, are raised by the controversy which warrant comment...

...their very use of the term, "the sexual function" - all pointed to this...

...Favoring sex education is now one more way of inexpensively and harmlessly validating one's own mind-boggling avant-gardism...

...Federal regulatory commissions, once established, never turn out to be staffed with the bright, dogged champions of the consumer interest who were fantasized at an earlier stage (rather, they turn out to be, in virtually every case, agents of the industry they are supposedly monitoring...

...What then could be wrong with permitting these elements finally to free America's youth from age-old sexual fears and misconceptions...

...Miss Breasted gives us a glimpse of what sex education, as it is put into operation, will probably amount to, to judge by what the teachers are being taught...

...The two great middle-class cartels, the American Medical Association and the National Education Association, were won for the cause, the NEA in particular becoming a great promoter of it, and HEW now provides funding for teacher education programs in the area...

...Where Miss Breasted fails to come to grips with a crucial issue is in relation to the fundamental question of what role the government is entitled to have in education at all...

...The counterargument of the sex educationists is that the alternative is learning about it "in the streets" (or, when they're being particularly fastidious, in the "gutter...

...luridness about much of the Right's thinking on this issue...

...The people who belonged to the SIECUS board," Miss Breasted tells us, "came from the highest levels of the university or church hierarchies...

...The discrepancy between glamorous public image and humdrum reality- between the packaging and selling of sex education and what it actually means and is - comes out in another way as well...

...Manchurian Candidate fears revolving around hypnosis, Pavlovian psychology, and rock music...

...but, if so, it would raise even more serious questions about the Pros...

...Pending the abolition of the government's quasi-monopoly of primary and secondary education (through something like Milton Friedman's voucher plan), sex education should be kept out of the public schools, even in cases where a majority of parents in a district may desire it (since it will virtually always be the case that they would be imposing their wishes on a substantial minority...