From farmyard lessons to AIDS campaigns, how schools began teaching sex
Wartime Britain faced evacuated children, unsupervised teenagers and young men and women working side by side for the first time. Officials worried about pregnancies straining a battered economy, so they issued guidance urging schools to explain reproduction partly through keeping livestock, where pupils could watch it happen for themselves.
For much of history the subject was simply off limits. Whatever instruction existed came from parents, often delayed until a wedding was close. That began to shift in the late 19th century, when North America's progressive education movement brought the topic into classrooms under the tidy label of social hygiene.
The British guidance of the Second World War, titled Sex Education in Schools and Youth Organizations, handed the job to schools and youth groups and suggested talks on menstruation, hygiene and motherhood alongside the farm animals. It made teaching possible without making it compulsory, and it lasted for years. After the war, other governments bent the subject toward their own goals. Singapore's first curriculum, running from 1966 to 1973, pushed birth control to head off overpopulation, while East Germany and Cuba framed lessons in the late 20th century around stronger families. In 1965 the Catholic Church, in a Second Vatican Council declaration on education, called for positive and prudent instruction. Swedish textbooks published between 1945 and 2000 show attitudes moving too, gradually recasting self-pleasure from harmful to harmless.
Classroom films caught on in the 1970s. Martin Cole's Growing Up, released in 1971, was so frank about physiology that it provoked a backlash. A decade later the arrival of HIV and AIDS in Britain made plain speaking look necessary. In 1999 the Labour government issued Sex and Relationships Education guidance as part of a ten-year Teenage Pregnancy Strategy. Teenage pregnancy rates did halve by 2010, but similar falls in countries without that plan suggest the strategy was not the cause.
Research on method is fairly consistent. A 2007 American review found that programmes covering contraception did not bring forward first sex or make it more frequent. A study by Mathematica Policy Research for the US Department of Health and Human Services judged abstinence-only-until-marriage courses ineffective, and a meta-analysis found they did not lower pregnancy and may have raised it.
Source: Sex education
