Teaching Sex
Moran, Jeffrey P.
BOOK S The end of innocence "discovery" of adolescence by the psy- lion....
...More important, sex ed- tion integrated into a broader effort to and repeated heartbreaks that seem to ucators shifted the responsibility for sex- train youthful imagination, taste, and accompany the youthful sex-is-fun culual control from adults and the social judgment...
...In- he is onto something important here...
...But in the long run, even the most morally neutral sex educator could not contend with the amoral sex-is-fun culture created by ARE THINGS REALLY THIS BADI Madison Avenue and Hollywood...
...Instead, he patiently and methodically traces the steady advance of sex education from early and modest efforts to prevent the spread of venereal disease among military recruits to more ambitious, broadly reformist efforts to improve the morals, health, and future family lives of teenagers...
...Though Moran doesn't say so exworld to teens and their inner world...
...Still, as Jeffrey Moran about sexual diseases predominated, as the history of sex education...
...Their duty was to pro- how to sustain relationships of mutual Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is the author of mote a dialogue with students and to help affection and respect, how to find a wor- The Divorce Culture (Alfred A. Knopf...
...Character is media, as adults became more adoles- ly told, no longer pay suffi- dead, he maintains, and the corpse cancent and adolescents became more like cient attention to those qual- not be revived...
...And the percentage of teenagers Throughout the century, Moran ex- ing for sex until marriage...
...Instead even as they expanded their mission to pregnancy has diminished...
...They Without Good and Evil young people through the increasingly seek to require states to emphasize charJames Davison Hunter perilous passage between childhood and acter education in schools, to formulate Basic Books, $25...
...They cast themselves as the new curricula, to elect politicians comguardians of youthful innocence...
...This a strong emphasis on abstinence with struggle required both individual self- plain talk about the dangers of HIV/AIDS control and a socially supported mora- and the measures required to protect torium on youthful sexuality...
...Frequently, medin the Twentieth Century trayed the central drama of adolescence icine and morals came together in an unJeffrey P. Moran as the struggle to subdue and redirect easy and ultimately unstable synthesis...
...Post-sex revolution, the boundaries separating teenagers from adults are increasingly difficult to draw, even more to enforce and sustain...
...And that's not all...
...who are sexually experienced has de- plains, sex education oscillated between Moran sees the sexual revolution of the clined modestly, more for teenage boys medicine and morality...
...His scrupulously fair-minded account ends with this bombshell conclusion: sex education has been a bust, pretty much from beginning to end...
...When anxieties 1960s and '70s as the watershed event in than for girls...
...itself to the big and neglected topic of stead, they assumed that teenage sexual- Today's sexually liberated teenagers are love...
...BOOK S The end of innocence "discovery" of adolescence by the psy- lion...
...cept captured the imagination of Pro- Mainly, however, sex educators stuck Barbara Dafoe Whitehead gressive reformers who were alarmed to conventional morality...
...Sex move sex education from health and P.E...
...faithfully describes the real-life experience of most teenagers...
...D ity was healthy, normal, and a matter of more confused than ever before about individual choice...
...them make responsible decisions...
...the epic poets of ancient Greece, the Old seeking to identify character's assassin, Today, Moran says, the twentieth-cen- and New Testaments and the religious "the vocabulary of the psychologist tury concept of adolescence no longer traditions they spawned, and the great frames virtually all public discussion...
...Harvard University Press, $27,95,288 ypv unruly sexual energies into the forma- For example, today's sex education blends tion of a sturdy moral character...
...ideas embedded in classic works of theHere Moran brings his story full circle, ology, philosophy, and literature...
...He would like to see sex educa- ease, but against the cruelty, deception, guage of choice...
...plicitly, I think he is suggesting that sex educators no longer saw their role as pro- into English and history classes...
...They replaced lieves it must change its focus and di- tect themselves, not only against disthe old moral vocabulary with the lan- rection...
...Sex educators saw themselves as or compile collections of moral stories, The Death of Character part of the larger professionalized re- hoping to persuade Americans to change Moral Education in an Age form movement to protect and guide their ways...
...When concerns about a breakdown chologist G. Stanley Hall...
...So has the rate of ual desires and preserve their innocence...
...mented, as adult sexual images and mes- Alan Wolfe James Davison Hunter, a sociologist at sages became more broadly diffused the University of Virginia, thinks that throughout the culture by the popular mericans, we are frequent- all such efforts are futile...
...Moran begins his story at the begin- "All yore need to know about the birds and the bees is that it's a sting operation...
...Moran casts doubt on the very idea that education can reform sexual behavior...
...The sexual demonstrates, sex education has ignited in wartime or with the advent of xtv/Aius, revolution unleashed ideas, energies, and controversy ever since it began early in the emphasis was the dangers of disease forces that threatened the entire sex-edthe twentieth century and is likely to con- and the medical facts of disease preven- ucation project...
...ning of the twentieth century with the Commonweal 2 1 June 2, 2000 ucators tried to accommodate the libera- education out of the schools, but he be- thy person to marry, and how to protionist spirit of the times...
...More to the point, the sex revolution challenged the very idea of adolescence...
...Despite periover mounting evidence that young peo- odic protests from parents and religious he ferocious battle over sex ple were falling victim to the tempta- conservatives, they devoted themselves education has died down in tions of secular urban life...
...Borrowing of morality prevailed, as they did with heavily from Victorian ideas of youth- the increase in unwed-teen pregnancy, - Teaching Sex ful sexuality and character formation, the emphasis shifted to chastity, abstiThe Shaping of Adolescence as well as evolutionary theory, Hall por- nence, and self-control...
...When it comes to the A adults, the entire rationale for sex edu- ities of character praised by moral life of children," writes Hunter, cation began to crumble...
...But as mitted to restoring firm Christian values, the boundaries between adolescence and or to seek to clothe the "naked public adulthood began to collapse, as adult su- square" with religious symbols or copies pervision and authority eroded and frag- of the Ten Commandments...
...For a time, some sex edtinue to do so...
...Happily, Moran does not take sides in this debate...
...Moran doesn't advocate tossing sex Commonweal 22 June 2, 2000...
...With Hall's to promoting premarital chastity and the past few years, as the theory, Progressives found a scientific the pleasures of married sex...
...This con- against this sexually transmitted disease...
...continued to preach the virtues of waitabortion...
...Some of back to the early decades of the twentieth those who share this concern write books century...
...In short, he would like to ture...
...adulthood...
...I think education might more usefully devote tecting the innocence of the young...
...Over time, sense of crisis over teen rationale for their reform efforts...
...Indeed, though Moran only hints at this, we may be witnessing the formation of something entirely new in human history: an autonomous teenage world, operating according to its own rules and assumptions, claiming the same sexual freedoms, rights, and privacy as adults, and recruiting parents as friends, confidantes, and helpmates in its sexual pursuits...
...Others go even further...
...352 pp...
...The unwed- of preaching morality, they could teach incorporate dating, courtship, marriage, teen birth rate has dropped steadily for young people how to manage their sex- and marital relationships, sex educators nine straight years...
Vol. 127 • June 2000 • No. 11
