(playful music)
- [Narrator] If you ever took a sex ed class in school,
it may have felt like this.
- Okay guys, no questions.
- [Narrator] Awkward.
And you probably didn't learn as much as you hoped.
- [Jonathan] Like, no, you didn't really get
your information from the gym teacher.
- I brought some charts.
- [Narrator] Well, if you had it awkward,
imagine how it was a century ago,
when people learned all about-
- Sex. - Sex.
- [Narrator] This is the history of sex education.
(bright music)
We all learn at some point, it's just a matter of how.
- [Jonathan] Sex education happens to everybody,
to all 7 billion people.
- [Narrator] This is John Zimmerman.
He wrote a book about the global history of sex ed.
- [Jonathan] It is too hot to handle.
Questions of sex touch on our most
intimate sense of ourselves.
And it's inevitable, I think,
that we're going to clash about it.
- You're disrupting the class, get out.
- Seriously?
- Yes, seriously, go.
- He can't say penis in sex ed, sir?
- I'm sorry, okay?
- [Narrator] There's not much evidence
of public sex ed before the early 1900s.
Sex was mostly talked about at home,
or discouraged entirely.
This book from a Massachusetts Reverend in 1835
calls masturbation a secret sin
that can cause memory loss and a weak mind.
- Very bad, very, very bad.
- [Narrator] In 1873, the Comstock law
actually makes it illegal to buy, sell,
or even mail any obscene materials in the US.
It's not until the social hygiene movement
that things start to change.
The Victorian era is ending, and marriage rates are down.
People see high rates of venereal disease
in middle-class white men
as proof that sex work is rampant,
and society is falling apart.
So in 1913, amid all this fear,
a group called the American Social Hygiene Association forms
in Buffalo, New York.
Their mission is to fight sexually transmitted infections
through education.
- [Jonathan] In the schools they start having
first informal talks by physicians.
There are very much oriented towards
this negative consequences, STDs and pregnancy.
- Ella Flagg Young in Chicago
is the first educator to bring this to schools.
As superintendent, she creates the first sex ed program
in the US, and at least 20,000 students attend.
But, it doesn't last long
before being shut down by opposition.
- No one will talk to students about their private lives.
- [Narrator] The ideas are already out there, though.
And in 1914, the first sex ed film is released.
It's scary.
(people screaming)
A man gets syphilis,
passes it onto his newborn baby,
and hints at a grim ending.
- You make sex sound terrifying.
- [Narrator] But, the film keeps growing in popularity.
The US Army even uses it in training camps
during World War I.
- [Jonathan] The fear of course,
is that soldiers are gonna get infected,
and terrible things will happen after that,
and hurt the war effort.
So there was a very explicit campaign
led by the war department to try to prevent that.
- [Narrator] The military ends up discharging
over 10,000 troops who get sick with STIs.
So in 1918, Congress takes a drastic measure,
an act called the American Plan
dedicates millions in federal funds
to fight venereal disease.
- [Jonathan] World War I is its own special case
because of course the federal government
got involved, right?
And something that's really important to understand,
for everybody to understand,
is that before the civil rights revolution,
the federal government did not have a hand in K-12 schools.
- [Narrator] The new law has two big goals,
educate teachers about STIs, and crack down on sex work.
Sex workers are seen as a threat to the troops,
and this law gives the military power to detain
any woman within five miles of a base,
force her to be tested for STIs,
and send her into quarantine at a hospital or farm colony.
- Very progressive.
- [Narrator] The Army's social hygiene division
even puts out these problematic posters.
Meanwhile, groups like the ASHA
are busy ramping up their own campaigns on the home front,
this time aimed at teenage boys to promote self control,
and staying away from immoral girls.
- We must never have sex again.
- [Narrator] The ASHA also starts sponsoring
educational films, like this one in 1920,
meant for high school and college students.
But these are painfully scientific,
and never mention people actually having sex.
Experts see these films as-
- [Jonathan] The so-called plumbing aspect.
- [Narrator] Yeah, like learning how pipes work.
- [Jonathan] Because when you get into the moral aspects,
and the ethical and the social ones,
which is the only thing that kids care about,
there's just not enough consensus.
- This video is not talking about safe sex at all.
- [Narrator] But, this is the roaring twenties,
and attitudes around sex and relationships
are changing fast.
- I'm down if you are.
- [Narrator] By the start of World War II,
Hollywood gets involved.
The US Army teams have with directors like John Ford,
the guy famous for making all these westerns.
- Stand aside, Martin.
- [Narrator] He releases this film in 1941.
- The Army recognizes the risks present
for the large number of men
in the satisfaction of their sexual impulse.
- [Narrator] And it becomes one of the most watched
sex ed films of all time.
The US is also amassing diplomatic power during the war.
- [Jonathan] That's where you see Americans
really trying to promote sex ed
and assist the development of sex ed in other countries.
What you also see, of course, is decolonization,
which means there are more independent countries
creating their own policies.
So the sex ed landscape becomes much more dense
and much more complex after the second World War.
- [Narrator] But when soldiers start coming home.
- [Announcer] How jubilant was the taste of victory.
How sweet the rewards of peace.
- [Narrator] A new panic is taking over
in place of the old fears of venereal disease.
And the media blames the lack of supervision.
At the same time, military training camps
moved their projectors into classrooms
where teachers show teens films about dating and marriage.
- Tonight, the feeling between us
kept getting stronger and stronger.
(foreboding music)
- [Narrator] The most popular one,
maybe even infamous, comes out in 1947.
- [Child] When does human growth began?
- [Narrator] "Human Growth" is the first film
about reproduction to be shown in public schools
for students as young as 11.
Life Magazine writes a five page spread,
calling it an epic making movie.
(applauding)
A psychology professor at the University of Oregon
wrote the film.
But after an outcry from parents,
it's banned in parts of the US.
- [Jonathan] One of the things you'll hear,
especially historians and social scientists say is that,
you know, the United States is all about the individual.
And over there in Europe,
they're much more about the collective.
On sex ed was the inverse.
In the United States and also in the UK,
sex ed was and continues to be oriented towards
preventing bad collected outcomes.
But in Northern Europe, especially Scandinavia,
they developed a sex ed with a very different goal,
which is to help each individual
lead what they called a healthy or pleasurable sexual life.
- [Narrator] In 1955, Sweden becomes the first country
to mandate sex ed in all of its schools.
And five years later,
the birth control pill hits the market.
People are getting married later and having more sex.
- I'm going to go all the way tonight.
I'm going to go all the way tonight.
- [Jonathan] It absolutely changed the way
Americans thought and acted around sex.
And so I would say that what the pill did was,
it underscored and brought into relief
some of these fundamental disagreements
about what sex is and what it should be.
- [Narrator] By 1964, teen pregnancies are on the rise,
and Dr. Mary Calderone starts
the Sexual Information and Education Council
of the United States.
The group gets federal funding and distributes study guides
about previously taboo topics like masturbation.
Religious groups push back,
and films like "Perversion for Profit" in 1965
warn audiences against this kind of deviance.
- A flood tide of filth is engulfing our country
in the form of news stand obscenities.
It is threatening to perverse an entire generation
of our American children.
- [Narrator] In 1968, The Christian Crusade
publishes this pamphlet that sells over 250,000 copies.
- Oh my God!
- [Narrator] But as the civil rights movement
gains momentum,
sex ed films get more bold and more inclusive.
They start to feature homosexuality,
feminism, and mixed race couples.
Meanwhile, overseas, sex and relationships education
becomes a requirement in UK schools in 1976.
- Okay everyone, it's SRE question time.
Okay.
- [Narrator] And the World Health Organization
starts to weigh in too.
- [Jonathan] By the late seventies and early eighties,
the WHO had targets for sex ed.
By the turn of the century, I guess,
80% of humanity will have the opportunity
to lead a healthy sexual life.
To which Zimmerman basically replies, WTF.
Like what is that?
Seriously does that mean like you get a lot?
Does that mean it feels really good?
- [Narrator] People all over the world
are asking the same question.
- But what about pleasure?
People don't always have sex to make a baby.
- [Narrator] And the debate continues until-
- [Jonathan] With HIV/AIDS, that all changes.
It makes everyone in every country, in some ways,
a fan of sex ed.
It's just that they want different kinds.
- [Narrator] In 1981, President Ronald Reagan
announces funding for abstinence-only sex ed in US schools.
Educators consider it a small win.
- Remember, it is always your right to say no, always.
- Cool.
- [Jonathan] Here's what a lot of people don't understand.
Abstinence education is sex education.
It may not be very good sex education.
I think most of it is not.
But, here's the historical point.
It's brought to you by people who, pre-HIV,
believed the schools
should have nothing to do with the subject
- [Narrator] And in 1986, a film called
"Sex, Drugs, and AIDS" is shown in New York schools.
- There's a lot of wrong information
going around about AIDS.
And that's dangerous.
- [Narrator] Of course the culture war doesn't stop
in the eighties or nineties, and it's still happening today.
But there's one really big difference.
- It's so easy, all you do is point and click.
- Can you explain what internet is?
- [Narrator] The internet changes everything.
- [Jonathan] Like it or not,
most of our young people are gonna get
most of their education from screens, not from schools.
Okay.
And that is new, right, in the historical scheme.
I'm much more inclined to take
a kind of fight fire with fire approach here,
which is, if the internet is transmitting some bad messages,
let's use the internet to transmit some better ones.
In the United States, there are now these really interesting
text messaging services,
instead of asking some other equally uninformed person,
you actually text that to somebody
who knows what they're talking about, and you get a reply.
That's sex education,
and I would argue it's excellent sex education.
- You know who's actually really good
at giving out sex advice?
- For the love of God.
Please go and talk about contraception
to a sexual health professional.
There's a sexual health clinic on Mayfield Road,
Mayfield Road.
Oh yeah, thanks.
(upbeat music)