Members of Parliament in England and Wales are calling for a reform to primary school sex education, which could see children as young as five being taught the mechanics of human reproduction alongside the emotional impact of recreational sex, pregnancy and parenthood. With teenage pregnancies in the UK at the number one spot in Europe, the Government understandably want to do something to arrest what seems to be an epidemic. But is this the right way to do it?
Sex education. ‘What’s that?’ I wondered. Necks tilted, we watched the small television screen mounted to the wall in our classroom, the teacher’s eyes as fixed as ours on the moving images. We were learning the ‘proper words’, you know, like ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’. How unexciting. More amusing was the trenchcoat-clad cartoon American detective who would go on to tell us about the thousands of bacteria that we would be harbouring if we didn’t wash our hands after going to the toilet. Hygiene was perhaps the most important thing they taught. We were 10 or 11 years old.
A nurse came to the school with some choice props, and all the boys were ushered into another classroom with our male teacher. While the young ladies were being prepared to deal with menstruation, us lads were given a heart-to-heart by our very real and caring teacher, a happily-married father of two. No doubt then, he was speaking from experience.
Recalling that neck-straining educational video once more, I think we all found the ‘wet dream’ scene strangely amusing. I don’t think any of us appreciated it fully, and at such an age we were at varying stages of physical development. The girls had started wearing bras in a minority of cases, but no-one was growing beards in Year 6, and we weren’t really at the stage where we would have to put this education into practice. Even then it was pretty early.
And what of teenage pregnancy? Well in subsequent years the girls had opted for older boyfriends who had already had the secondary school PSE (Personal and Social Education; now Personal Social and Health Education, PSHE) lesson with the ‘Durex Demonstrator’ and the free condoms. By the age of fourteen I knew several girls who were sexually active, two years before it was legal. They weren’t getting pregnant, they were applying what they’d learnt from that first lesson at age 10 or 11: contraception is easily available and sex is okay as long as it’s safe. While these statements certainly ring true, is this the kind of candid truth we want our youngest to discover? Perhaps in all honesty we do, but it is certainly not the whole truth.
Morals are a subject often referenced as being in general decline. As science is increasingly used to ‘disprove’ religious beliefs, humanists and evangelists are locked in a head-on struggle, each going to further extremes to make themselves right by making the other party as wrong as possible. Neither of them would say that morals are a bad idea, but both would criticise each other’s idea of the subject. Yet morals are neither exclusively religious nor secular in nature. They are simply agreements based on common sense.
The sexual abuse of children, rape, promiscuity—these are considered by many to be immoral. They go against the widely-held views of society that children are children, adults are responsible for themselves, and one should be faithful to his or her sexual partner, with some differences in areas where polygamy is part of the culture. But the old law of the omitted data comes into play very quickly in this arena:
WHERE THERE IS NO DATA AVAILABLE PEOPLE WILL INVENT IT.
This is the Law of the Omitted Data.
A vacuum tends to fill itself. Old philosophers said that “nature abhors a vacuum.” Actually the surrounding area of pressure flows into an area of no pressure.
—L. Ron Hubbard, 1972
If we choose to let our children be taught about sex, it has to be within the social context. In addition, it has to be at a time and in a manner that can be identified with by the children. Your average five-year old boy hates girls and thinks they’re from another planet, or is scared to death of them. He’s not interested in what he can do with his manhood, unless he needs the loo. At that age, that’s all it’s useful for. The unfortunate reality is that the entire social fabric could be corrupted by premature sex education, compounded by the inadequacy of moral standards.
My opinion, which I am sure is shared by parents across the country, is that this is a case of upbringing and not necessarily one of primary education; parents should be able to educate their children on the facts of life when their children are ready for it, when they enquire, or when mummy and daddy decide it’s time for a talk about ‘the birds and the bees’. And seldom will this be at five years old.
Real problems that grip the youth of today’s society are broken families and alcohol and drug abuse. Ill sexual health and teenage pregnancy tend to fall somewhere alongside or between these issues, and are more of a symptom than the cause. Areas that are lacking in British schools, per my recent experience, are effective drug education and instilling a general sense of responsibility in students. These are not simple tasks, but their ramifications if skilfully implemented are wide-ranging.
By the will of ill-informed psychologists, teachers are being advised to leave more and more to the whim of students, even if their instinct tells them this would be irresponsible. Harm minimisation is a drug education concept, but is mirrored in sex education and in general in today’s school system. It doesn’t work to improve anything, but is a way of passively giving in to the idea that ‘change is impossible’. Consider this: children who underperform in some secondary school subjects are entered into lower ‘tiers’ of examination, for which they are taught to aim for a limited level. Even if a student decides he or she is going to get all the answers on the exam paper correct, and even if he manages to, he will never attain the top grade if his teachers have entered him into the ‘intermediate’ or ‘foundation’ tier. Most tiered subjects have a ‘higher’ paper in which it is possible to attain an A*-D grade, and a ‘foundation’ paper in which the highest grade is C. Some have a third (‘intermediate’) in the middle of the two, which can deliver grades B-E. This is ‘harm minimisation’ at work in academic subjects.
The question remains, is it moral to teach the very young about a subject they cannot and should not use until they are older? Try teaching a five-year old neurology and let me know how it goes. Until then, I’ll reserve judgement, and say no.
News Articles
- MPs call for sex education in primary schools (WalesOnline)
- Compuslory sex education for children under five proposed (Daily Telegraph)
- Young children should be taught about sex, MPs say (Times Online)