Documentation: Sex Education on Trial—What They’re Teaching Our Children

Warning: this article features content of an explicit nature.

The piece that follows is somewhat out of character for Crisis and may be found to be disturbingly indelicate by some of you. We shall be describing in some detail a sex-education curriculum for ninth and tenth graders (ages roughly 13-15). The curriculum we shall be summarizing is one called About Your Sexuality, created by on Deryck Calderwood (Revised Edition).

It was prepared at the behest, or at least under the aegis, of the Unitarian Universalist Church, has been widely circulated, and has also served as something of a model for other curricula.

One further apology—about language. Since Mr. Calderwood encourages the teachers to speak to the kids in “their own slang,” and since we cannot give the full flavor of this document without quoting exactly from it, we have decided here and there to use the old-fashioned system of hyphens to stand in for letters.

For those who enter into the great debate about sex education in the schools on the supposition that this means teaching the children about reproductive biology and hygiene—as well as for those content to leave the debate to others—we hope to provide a somewhat more specific grasp of what is nowadays meant by the term.

To be sure, Mr. Calderwood’s course does cover such traditionally sanctified subjects for teaching in the classroom as the biology of conception and birth, a sketchy introduction to the field of genetics, and the obligatory cautionary discussion of the sexually transmitted (formally “venereal”) diseases. However, these traditional areas of sex education are disposed of with all due haste and in a curiously patronizing fashion.

The transmissibility of venereal disease, for instance, is to be illustrated for the students by a game involving the exchange of differently colored M&M candies, and for an introduction into the subject of conception and birth, the teacher is advised to take the children through a book for toddlers called The True Story of How Babies Are Made.

The topic for whose sake courses of this kind are nowadays most passionately being urged upon church groups, youth groups, and above all classrooms, is of course that single session of About Your Sexuality called “Birth Control and Abortion.” Given the fact that this and the traditional school subjects together constitute only about one-fourth of the whole course, clearly the advocates of Mr. Calderwood’s educational methods have a few other fish to fry.

The topics to be covered aside from those mentioned above, are “Male and Female Sexual Anatomy,” “Masturbation,” “Opposite Sex Friendships,” “Same Sex Friendships,” “Sexual Minorities in Society,” “Femininity and Masculinity,” and “Love-making: Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Homosexual.”

In fact the bulk of this course is conceived and organized to be far from a didactic enterprise. Each topic to be covered has its own separate teaching guide, its own film strip or tape recording or both (along with such suggested teaching aids as newsprint, felt markers, yarn, masking tape, and of course, M&Ms). All of the sessions are constructed to resemble a cross between one of those human-potential therapies and the kind of group-dynamics training that came some years ago to be the rage among corporate management bureaucracies.

Each lesson is supposed to progress through four stages. There is the “initiation” stage, in which the group comes to understand why the issue under examination that day is important. Next there is the “interaction” stage, in which by means of certain organized exercises the group members come to articulate the questions that they as individuals, or as members of opposite sexes, need to have answered. Third, there is the “investigation stage,” in which the questions just raised are answered. This is where the film strips and tapes come in (and other forms of information: in the “Male and Female Anatomy” session, for example, teaching aids also include jock straps, tampons, and sanitary napkins). And last—the object of the entire exercise—is the stage of the session called “internalization.” Here, as its name suggests, is where the children arrive at what all this means to me.

In short, the purpose of this course is not to provide the information needed to bring these 13- to 15-year-olds out of ignorance but to open their hearts and minds and nervous systems to the entire range of sexual possibility. (And when we say entire, we mean entire—everything from the desire of the male masturbator to taste his own semen to the pleasure of oral contact with the anus of one’s sexual partner.) The children are, naturally, meant to learn tolerance for others, but mainly, in keeping with human-potential theory, for themselves. Anything, to follow Mr. Calderwood’s suggestion about the use of slang, that does it for you, baby.

Take the session on male and female anatomy. This one features a film strip with 33 frames. Among these are seventeen featuring close-ups photographs or drawings of male and female genitals from various angles and in various states of arousal, a drawing of varieties of hymen, one of variations in breast shape and nipple form, a medium shot of a female masturbating and a medium shot of a female wearing a sanitary belt and napkin.

In accompaniment of frame 25, the masturbating female, the teacher is supposed to say: “Gentle massage of the clitoris brings intensely pleasurable sensations and sexual arousal. If the stroking is continued the female reaches a high peak of sensation…. What slang terms do we use for female masturbation? For orgasm?”

The session called “Sexual Minorities in Society” largely speaks for itself. In a note to the teacher at the beginning of this pamphlet it is pointed out that among the generality of Americans homosexuality is regarded not with distaste or disgust but with panic: “nobody is sure that he might not succumb.” It is this panic which the lesson seeks to overcome, mainly by raising the awareness of the students about gay and lesbian experience through introducing them to the homosexual press, and also, as with “Opposite Sex Friendships,” showing them how faint and arbitrary are the boundaries between this form of relationship and that, and how natural and loving it all is, or at least can be.

By far the richest of these curricula, however, is the one called “Lovemaking: Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Homosexual.” With good reason does Mr. Calderwood suggest that the teacher might wish to carry this particular lesson over beyond a single sitting. We, too, shall go into it in some detail.

To begin with, the group is to become acquainted with the subject of lovemaking through sampling songs and poetry. For the heterosexual side of things, the course guide points out, “Some of the contemporary songs played and sung by the many groups to which today’s young people listen focus on the lovemaking and intercourse experience…. Such songs represent a familiar place from which to begin an exploration….” The teacher is advised to bring in some recordings, play them for the class, and discuss the experience each refers to.

In the same way, bisexual and male homosexual lovemaking can be introduced with selections from the albums of the homosexual musicals “Let My People Come” and “Boy Meets Boy.” (Interestingly enough, Mr. Calderwood provides a considerably longer and more heavily annotated list of recommended lesbian songs—perhaps because for children these might not be recognizable as such without some special consciousness-raising.)

As for the poetry of heterosexual lovemaking and intercourse, we are offered a wide variety of selections, from The Song of Songs to e.e. cummings, to Rod McKuen, to a lady named Lenore Kandel (“I love you / your c- – – in my hand stirs like a bird / in my fingers / as you swell and grow hard in my hand,” etc.). The homosexual poetry ranges from Plato, Sappho, and Walt Whitman to a poem called “Bringing Her Out” by Harriette Frances and an anonymously composed limerick titled “AC/DC” (“There was a young man from Racine / who invented a f- – -ing machine; / Concave and Convex / It fit either sex / And was perfectly simple to clean!”).

After the songs and poetry reading comes the film strip. Actually, for this topic there are two sets of film strips, one for the early, “arty,” part of the session and one to be presented later. The first consists of photographs of how artists have depicted lovemaking and intercourse in their work. The second includes a chart showing the four stages of “lovemaking” identified by Masters and Johnson; two “lovemaking” sequences, each depicting a couple moving through four stages of this activity, including “such behavior as fellatio, cunnilingus, and soixante-neuf (69), as well as anal intercourse.” The teacher is advised to show this sequence slowly, ask the group to share their feelings in reaction to it, then show it a second time, so they may discuss it further.

Next, of course, comes the filmstrip for homosexual behavior, which has one unit depicting male/male intercourse and one depicting female/female. Once again the teacher is instructed to show the sequence slowly, and then again: “It may take some time to appreciate and enjoy the beauty of the experience.” The picture show is to be preceded by the playing of tapes of people talking about their sexual initiations, both for good and ill, of which seven are heterosexual and seven homosexual.

The “investigation” concludes, not surprisingly, with a questionnaire about their own sexual experiences to be filled out by the children. At this point, it says, the teacher must promise absolute anonymity and must in return ask the students to promise that they, too, will not share the information “with other teachers, with parents, or even with friends” (italics added). Unfortunately there is no space here to reproduce this questionnaire in full. But we shall attempt to suggest the flavor of the thing. The questions are divided between experiences before the age of twelve and those after that age, either with members of the same sex or those of the opposite sex. For the post-twelve experiences the children are asked to check off whether they have (with a female or a male) ever engaged in, among others: feeling and fondling outside clothes; feeling and fondling inside clothes; kissing or sucking nipples; partner handling my penis inside clothes; kissing, licking, or sucking partner’s sex organs; partner kissing or sucking one’s own; having anal intercourse; accepting money to have sex. This list is far from exhaustive (the questionnaire is two printed pages long) but should suffice.

The “internalization” stage for this lesson, and a rollicking time it must be for teacher, centers on the question of how the kids have decided for themselves whether or not to engage in sexual activity and how these sessions might have affected their decision.

There are several things to say about all this. The first and most obvious is that this course, and a number of others like it that we have seen over the years (beginning, e.g., with the preachments of Mary Calderone), are not designed to teach either the science of gender and reproduction or the facts of birth control but rather to initiate the kiddies into the no-longer-to-be-hidden arcanities of sexuality. In that sense, it represents the massification of the ideas of those avant-garde, therapeutically-minded parents of the 1950s who professed to teaching their children to be natural about sex but were in truth in some unrecognized way stimulating them instead. The consequences we know, the 1960s having among many other things constituted a matchless laboratory experiment of childrearing practices.

Second, anyone who troubled himself to look at and exercise a bit of imagination about those teenage mothers and the affectless boyfriends who constitute the main pretext for bringing these courses into the school would know that such boys’ and girls’ feelings and attitudes and behavior do not arise from ignorance but from something else. That something else will not yield itself to the Calderwood treatment, nor to the mass distribution of condoms, nor to any of the other nostrums offered with such impatient assurance by those who prefer to prescribe for some abstract formulation rather than for real flesh and blood.

Leaving aside the question of adolescent pregnancy, anyone who has ever paid attention to, or genuinely sympathized with, children of junior high school age would know that such material would not enlighten, but rather, in about equal proportions, deeply distress and titillate them. Whether or not this was Mr. Calderwood’s conscious intention we cannot presume to say. But for God’s sake, does it take some kind of Christian fundamentalism, some puristic crusading spirit, to be outraged by the prospect of 14-year-olds, boys and girls together, responding to an invitation to contemplate the licking of anuses? Anyone who does not instantly understand what is outrageous about this, we are perfectly prepared to say, is either demented or is lying to himself or to others.

Most of the present advocates of sex education in the schools are, to be sure, neither demented not conscious liars. But they are doing something dangerously blind and self-protective. Just as the authors of these “enlightened” courses do not look at what children actually are, lest they be disturbed somehow in their mindless and self-flattering assumptions, so the proponents of having such courses in the schools do not pay any attention to what their teachings actually consist of. If they did, they might be unpleasantly surprised. It is, after all, so much easier if you are an addict of liberal nostrums to set aside any question of their actual effect in the real world and save your moral energy for slinging mud at those who dare to doubt you.

Author

  • Midge Decter

    Midge Decter is a neo-conservative journalist and author of The Liberated Woman and Other Americans (1971), The New Chastity (1972), and Liberal Parents, Radical Children (1975).

tagged as:

Join the Conversation

in our Telegram Chat

Or find us on
Item added to cart.
0 items - $0.00

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

Signup to receive new Crisis articles daily

Email subscribe stack
Share to...