Sex Education in Public Schools

A controversy is sweeping America, one that has stirred up some communities more than anything else since McCarthy’s hunts two decades ago. The issue: sex education.

Actually, “sex education” in the schools extends back for decades, if the phrase is taken to mean high-school courses on the family or biology lectures on reproduction. But the current controversy has developed since 1962, when researchers for School Health Education Study discovered after extensive surveys that most young people were receiving haphazard, deficient sex instruction at home. Alarmed, though not really shocked, the National Education Association and the American Medical Association decided to form a “voluntary health organization” that would serve as an inspiration, guide, and clearing house for sex-education programs in local schools across America. They named it the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). And, unwarily, they planted the seeds of today’s controversy.

For five years, SIECUS directors and officers were continually called upon by school administrators throughout the country to help develop materials and guidelines for sex-education programs. They published study guides, served as consultants, and spoke at schools and seminars, in an effort to create a more wholesome national sexual climate. Their aim, as they describe it, is “to help people five their total lives as whole human beings, neither sex machines nor repressed hermits, neither sexual exploiters nor sexually exploited.”

Programs spurred by SIECUS ranged from popular three-week pilot classes for 3,000 fifth graders in Chicago to family-living courses for 166 of New York City’s schools. In Kansas City, Missouri, seventh-graders started learning about sex through television. Fayette County, Kentucky, began sending teachers away to workshops on human development. By fall of 1968 more than 60 per cent of America’s school systems had begun formal courses on sex. And the public paid little attention.

Then came the harvest. At first, scattered parents and church groups took surprised note of what was happening and began campaigns against sex education in the schools. They adopted such names as People Against Unconstitutional Sex Education (PAUSE), Sanity of Sex (SOS), Mothers for Moral Stability (MOMS), and Parents Opposed to Sex and Sensitivity Education (POSSE). By January of this year, the movement was growing rapidly. In Liberty, Missouri, the Faith and Freedom Center sponsored a community book-burning to publicize its cause. In Anaheim, California, home of a “model” sex-education program, voters surprised everybody by filling two of three contested school-board posts with sex-education opponents. In Michigan, a meeting of the state board of education was disrupted by sex-education protesters. And by spring, few regions were untouched by the controversy.

According to many observers, initial responsibility for the furor lay with such right-wing organizations as the John Birch Society, Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade, Carl McIntire’s “Twentieth Century Reformation Hour,” and the American Education Lobby, a small group formed in Washington, D. C., several years ago to fight federal aid to education. This observation appears well founded: most of the heat has indeed been generated since the far-right groups adopted opposition to sex education as a “cause.”

Within a few months the American Education Lobby sold more than 150,000 pamphlets calling SIECUS board members “Communists,” “pornographers,” and “subverters.” “We couldn’t get off the ground financially until this issue came along,” said an AEL administrator. “Now we can’t keep up with the demand.” Statements from the speeches of Dr. Mary Calderone, executive director of SIECUS, have been scissored and pasted to make her appear to be an advocate of premarital intercourse when in fact she opposes it. Birch- or Christian Crusade-inspired citizens’ groups have mounted telephone or “community-education” crusades in at least thirty states. And in several of those states they have prompted legislative debates or new laws.

But the ultra-conservatives hold no corner on the opposition; the fight has enlisted many respected, concerned parents and scholars who might ordinarily blanch at the thought of being associated with a far-right cause. One of the best known is New York child-analyst Rhoda Lorand, the author of Love, Sex and the Teenager, who has criticized the new programs for teaching elementary school children what they are not psychologically ready to learn, for overstimulating and frightening them, and for attempting what only the home can do well. Others like her have complained that many teachers are not personally competent to teach sex education, or that society’s views on sex are too pluralistic to allow proper consideration in the public schools.

Despite the opposition, educators in most areas are pushing ahead with sex-education courses. They point to a recent Gallup Poll showing that the great majority of Americans favor some kind of program in the schools, as well as to the failure of homes and churches to give adequate training. As a Minneapolis school administrator recently put it: “The opponents say we are doing things we are not. If we dropped the program now, we’d really catch it. With 78 per cent of the parents in favor, we’d have the other side on our back, I’m sure.”

All this raises several questions for the Christian who wants to act responsibly in the current controversy. Among them:

How valid are the attacks on SIECUS?

To hear the commission’s board members tell it (and they make a case worth listening to), not at all. The organization was founded to foster a healthier attitude toward sex in America and to fight “the commercial and entertainment use of sex,” which is “flagrantly exploitive, focusing attention on women and men as sexual commodities.…” Dr. Calderone, a Quaker, said in an interview that her basic motivation for working with the council was religious. She categorically denied charges that she favors either today’s permissive climate or premarital intercourse.

A careful reading of SIECUS materials gives no support to right-wing claims that the group’s ulterior motives are prurient. Both its study guides and its news letters, aimed at professionals rather than the public, can most accurately be described as scientific and scholarly. Even the popular magazine Sexology, for which several SIECUS board members have written articles, thus drawing from the far right the label “sex exploiters,” can hardly be regarded as lascivious. At least it cannot if one reads the articles themselves rather than just the headlines (for Sexology editors admit to the questionable practice of making covers and titles “provocative” in order to attract the kinds of readers who “need the wholesome and reliable sex information in the articles”).

This is not to say, however, that the Christian who accepts the Scriptures as normative should view SIECUS-related materials uncritically. Much to the contrary. For, while its materials treat sex with a much needed wholesomeness and a medical accuracy, they nevertheless do so from an unbiblical, relativistic point of view that the evangelical finds unsatisfactory.

In a SIECUS study guide on Sex, Science and Values, for example, Dr. Harold Christensen of Purdue University argues for a “morality of consequences” that refuses to be satisfied with the announcement that “God has spoken.” Actions, he says, should be judged solely by their effects. As explained by other SIECUS board members, this means that the matter “of a premarital sexual standard is a personal moral choice,” or that man today should not “depend on revelation for authority.” Clearly, the Christian who accepts God’s Word as authoritative, who accepts Paul’s lists of sins in Romans and First Timothy as part of God’s message to man, will find in this kind of relativism a warning flag at the least, and perhaps a stop sign. He will probably find the SIECUS-related materials useful: they are among the best prepared, most factual in the field. But he will use them cautiously, constantly examining their value judgments against the Word of God.

Where should sex education take place?

Without question, proper sex education is needed. Even extreme conservatives rarely deny this. Many young people have come to grief because they either were unwarily naïve or had learned about sex solely from gutter talk and trashy films. And many others have been sadly stunted by repressive, unwholesome, guilt-producing teaching about sex. The problem is where and how sex education should be given.

An interfaith statement on sex education, produced by major Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic groups, states squarely: “Responsibility for sex education belongs primarily to the child’s parents or guardians.” Indeed, one might add, so does responsibility for all moral instruction. It was to parents that Moses said: “Teach [God’s commandments] diligently to your children” (Deut. 6:7). It was parents to whom children were first commanded to give allegiance (Exod. 20:12). It was the beginning of a home that Paul referred to when he used the metaphor of Christ’s love for his church (Eph. 5:25). No place is so well suited for sex education as the home, with its atmosphere of mutual trust, love-saturated learning situations, and continual contact between pupil (child) and teacher (parent).

Ideally, that is. Many parents fail miserably in this instructional task. They either make no effort to teach their children about sex or, as is more common, impart only their own frustrations, wrong attitudes, or incorrect knowledge. A recent poll of 1,000 teen-agers taken by Purdue professors showed that only 15 per cent of the boys and 35 per cent of the girls learned about sex from their parents. Other studies concur.

Clearly, some other institution must step in if the initiative is to be taken away from the misinformed, often obscene “teachers” of the streets. So, one says, let us turn to the Church. But that raises problems, too. Few churches are equipped or willing to initiate major sex-education programs. And most youths who need such programs do not attend any one church regularly enough to receive adequate instruction. The only institution left, it would seem, is the school. The Christian might do well to put his major effort into seeing that sound, acceptable courses are developed there rather than into emotional, negative crusades against what are probably inevitable programs.

What, then, is left for parents in sex education?

The answer is simple: Everything that was there before. Sexuality, the educators point out, starts at birth; it includes the child’s feelings about his own maleness or femaleness, his social relations with other children, his attitudes toward sex organs. And in a sense, sex education continues until death, since attitudes, bodily functions, and social roles keep changing as long as life goes on.

It thus remains important for parents at home to evidence wholesome attitudes toward this God-given, God-blessed area of life, to discuss it with freedom and dignity, to use correct terminology, to keep communication channels open, to adjust training to the child’s rate of emotional and intellectual growth. If the school teaches sex education, the ideal Christian parent will supplement, and if necessary correct, that teaching. If the school omits it, this parent will give his own flexible, informal, yet complete home instruction.

But that is not enough. Responsible parents will also concern thenselves with what the community is doing. A major reason for the current furor was the failure of most parents to pay attention during the past few years. In Chicago, for example, the school system had been developing its sex-education program since 1966, trying continually to keep parents informed. Suddenly this spring scores of parents had the programs brought to their attention by the rightest organizations. And they blew up. Concern by these same parents from the start might have given educators a better appreciation for community attitudes and saved a good deal of misunderstanding.

The Christian parent should also work to secure wholesome, high-level programs. Many of the school programs need more of a moral framework for the teaching of sex—a framework that should be consistent with Judeo-Christian culture, yet tolerant of varied religious views in the community. Some parents may need to use their influence to ensure that sex instruction takes into account differences in the maturity levels of individual children, as Dr. Lorand insists, and that it is not started too soon. They may also be concerned with seeing that the programs use capable, responsible teachers, that sex instruction treats the whole of life rather than just anatomy, and that developing programs undergo adequate review.

Finally, what is the role of the Church?

Although the divergency of people, theology, liturgy, and social practices precludes a simple, uniform answer, at least three points seem clear.

First, merely criticizing existing programs is not enough. Too many crusaders against sex education do just that. They decry moral corruption; they castigate those who develop sex-education programs; they fling such labels as Communist, pornographer, exploiter; they demand that schools discontinue programs. Yet they offer no constructive alternatives—no ways to deal with the problem of the millions of homes where sex education is grossly inadequate, no suggestions for slowing the process of moral decay.

Second, the Church would do well to back up its message of personal salvation with both active witnessing and its own sex-education programs. Regeneration does not eliminate all frustration, guilt feelings, ignorance, and temptations in the area of sex. Yet the Church has made no widespread systematic effort to cope with these problems. A bright young evangelical recently glanced at the “Letters” section of Sexology magazine, then commented, “They raise a lot of my own questions, but I wouldn’t dare ask them of the church people.” She was typical—tragically so, since the Church has a responsibility to minister to the whole man.

Third, and closely related, the evangelical world needs a new, thoroughly biblical theology of sex. Numerous authors have dealt with aspects of man’s sexuality, some of them skillfully. But to say that the evangelical church as a whole has come to grips with all that God’s Word has to say about sexual activities and relationships would be unrealistic. Often culturally developed social mores have been uncritically accepted, then preached as biblical. As society’s standards change, the Church is caught unprepared.

The Bible has much to say about sex, and its comments need to be studied and drawn into a theological scheme. How, for example, does the Song of Solomon relate to Romans one? How does the command to Hosea to marry a harlot fit Paul’s admonitions about marriage? Are the sexual sins of Paul’s Corinthian list more serious than the covetousness found in the same list?

Dr. Calderone says “there are not authorities in this field” of sex education. Perhaps not. But members of the Church of Christ, believers in the inspiration of God’s Word, do have an authority to which they can turn. One wonders if they can ever hope to make an effective contribution to the current discussion unless they turn more searchingly and systematically to that Source.

James Huffman is now in Japan doing research for a Ph.D. in Japanese history from the University of Michigan. He holds teh A.B. from marion College and master’s degrees from Northwestern university and Michigan. He has been a reporter for the Minneapolis “Tribune.”

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