In 1994 Clinton administration Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was forced to resign amidst
stinging condemnation of her stance on a major political issue: sex. In front of an audience,
she said that she was in favor of masturbation being part of children’s sex education curriculum,
noting that it was a safer alternative to high risk sex.
Dr. Elders drew ire from conservative officials and members of her own democratic party. Her views on
pro-choice policies, the legalization of certain drugs, and distributing contraceptives in
schools to minimize the spread of STIs made her a lightning rod of controversy during
her tenure as Surgeon General. So an aversion to kids being taught about the more...indelicate
parts of sex by school officials turned out to be an unexpected bipartisan unifier.
But we’ve come a long way in our collective knowledge on sex since pamphlets in the 1830s and before
which described masturbation as “self-pollution” that could lead to blindness and insanity.
But the core questions that make school administrators so darn squeamish about sex ed have remained
relatively unchanged. Namely:
What (if any) information on sex should school curriculums include?
How much is enough or too much? And should schools be in the business of doling
out info on sexual health at all?
Prior to the 20th century, information on sex and sexuality was largely confined to
two spheres: homes and religious institutions. Students (and children in general) were expected
to gain any knowledge of the mysteries of human sexuality from their parents or their
religious leaders. Schools didn’t disseminate information about sex at all because in the
US they were largely privately owned and operated until the tail end of the 19th century.
This was for a variety of reasons, including the fact that schooling wasn’t mandatory
for all children in the US and schools weren’t usually run by government agencies. Although
The Boston Latin School was the first public school opened in 1635 in what would later
become the United States, governments didn’t have control over things such as admissions
and curriculums.
This took a huge turn in the late 19th century when after the Industrial Revolution reformers
and educators began to push the concept that all children SHOULD be educated. And though
their definition of “all” often meant young white boys, ideas about the virtues
of education became more widespread. Facilities for female students, black students, orphaned
students, poor students, and students of color sprung up rapidly, with the common mission
to provide some form of education to the masses.
But subjects varied dramatically from school to school. Some elite institutions focused
on a “classic” education that centered around things like Latin, Greek, and the humanities.
Others were trade schools that placed higher importance on teaching skills for the workforce.
And others still were religious schools that coupled moral instruction with education.
Then in the early 20th century governments across the US and Europe began to do two things.
First they started to regulate child labor practices, meaning that kids couldn’t work
for untold numbers of hours. In 1938, this culminated with the passage in the US of the
Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the minimum work age at 14, 16 during the school year,
14 for after school jobs, and 18 for dangerous jobs.
And secondly governments started to regulate how many years students had to stay in school,
then raised the age to 16 and later 18. Massachusetts passed the first mandatory schooling act in
the US in 1852 and Mississippi was the final state to pass one in 1918. So work hours were
greatly reduced while school hours saw a sharp incline. You can learn more about this in
our video “Why is 18 considered an adult?”
And once students started spending the majority of their active hours from Monday to Friday
in schools, schools began to take on a greater social significance and importance in the lives of their students.
So school attendance was mandatory nationwide by 1918, and the numbers of children being
placed in school steadily increased after that after the laws were enforced. But the first instance of the American
government getting in on the sex ed front didn’t take place in classrooms. Rather
it took place in the army.
After widespread outbreaks of STIs during WW1, Congress passed the Chamberlain-Kahn
Act in 1918. Folded into this law was language on educating soldiers about the dangers of
widespread venereal diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea. This education largely came
in the form of clinics, pamphlets and lectures. There were also waves of government memoranda on health
that were released at the same time. They taught new recruits about clean water, proper
sanitation, vaccinations, and personal hygiene (plus a fair amount of discussion about how
to properly dispose of poop).
The Chamberlain-Kahn Act was especially centered around keeping military bases and the surrounding
areas (identified as “extra-cantonment zones” in health reports) free from disease. And
around this same time police and government officials were given the authority to arrest
and detain anyone they suspected was carrying an STI in and around army bases.
But the prevailing (mis)information at the time was that the primary carriers of these
diseases were only women, civilians, and sex workers. Thousands of women were arrested
and detained in state managed prisons and hospitals, all under the supposition that
they were either infecting soldiers or moving closer to military bases because they were
sex workers.
The Chamberlain-Kahn era of sexual education is widely considered extreme (and a human
rights violation) today. But the agenda outlined in the act in fact demonstrates the long standing
relationship between the government, sexual instruction and overall health of its citizens.
So sex has frequently been aligned with the concepts of overall health, hygiene, and disease
prevention. But when did schools get in on the act?
In his book Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education historian Jonathan Zimmerman
traces the history of when sex ed entered schools around the world. He begins his study
with an anecdote about a failed measure brought before the League of Nations in 1928 by the
British delegation.
Zimmerman notes how the British delegation proposed that the League should support the
worldwide expansion of sexual instruction in schools under the heading of “biological
education.” They used (founded) fears about the spread of venereal diseases, mixed with
coded language about eugenics and racial purity.
Although the measure didn’t advance, sex ed in the postwar period did begin to take
root in countries like Japan, the US, and Great Britain. Governments and health care
officials were becoming more aware that reliable information on sexual health was scarce amongst
the general public. And they were also invested in things like maintaining the health and
"purity" of their citizens and soldiers.
With the spread of compulsory education, schools became the one place where health officials
had a truly captive audience. Plus, when it became mandatory, they can guarantee in
theory that all children were getting this vital information. Along with the expansion
of state run schools nationwide in the early 20th century came a slew of ideas about what
responsibility educators (and governments) had to the children in their care. At different
points in time the agenda of sex education was taken up, or abandoned based on shifts
in the answer to this question of moral responsibility.
Early sexual education rolled out piecemeal during the 1920s-1950s, with Sweden becoming
the first country in the world to require sex ed for all students in 1956. And although
the US has often had a contentious and spotty history with it, the US was also an early
adopter of giving students information about the birds and the bees. But the controversies
that erupted around the 1928 push in the League of Nations to spread sex ed world wide sound
pretty much identical to the arguments heard today (minus the stuff about eugenics). And this essentially breaks down into
3 categories:
The first is that sex and sexuality is a topic that should be left up to parents. In fact
Zimmerman notes how many early opposers of teaching sex in school thought that schools
were encroaching on the territory of moral instruction that should be the rightful domain
of parents. Some said that sex was best taught by mothers, without the influence of local
governments.
Second is that integrating sex into schools often brings the question “how much is too
much?” front and center. While some think any education on the topic of sex is a bad
thing, others disagree and think that students should learn vital facts and unbiased knowledge.
But even among those who think that sex ed is a good thing, opinions vary about exactly
what to teach. Some want an all inclusive sex ed curriculum that teaches about safe
sex, answers students health questions, and also looks at the wider and more complex spectrum
of human sexuality. Others think that sex ed should be tied to other types of “moral
instruction” which has included methods that centered on “family life education”
and traditional family planning in the 1950s and 60s.
At that time hysteria about the rise of teen pregnancies led to courses where sex was discussed
largely using euphemisms and metaphors about animals and plants. But in the wake of the
AIDS epidemic, comprehensive sex ed that taught about disease prevention did experience a boom
in the late 1980s until the mid 1990s.
On the other hand, around this same time you began getting federal support for abstinence only education, and in the
late 90s Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) programs exploded nationwide. Returning to
the days when only basic facts and abstinence outside of marriage was the standard method
of sex ed, Abstinence only education has been linked to poorer outcomes for students overall.
And the third reason centers not on clueless kids, anxious administrators, and peeved parents,
but rather on the often forgotten middle guy: that’s right teachers. Because even though
mandates and guidelines get handed down from government officials, and parents may picket
the school board meetings if they don’t get their way, at the end of the day it’s
teachers who are left to dole out this information to waiting pupils. And just like with any
subject, essentially what a kid learns or doesn’t learn is left up to who is holding
the chalk at the front of the room. I just realized that chalk at the front of the room
is an outdated metaphor but we’ll go with it.
Zimmerman points out that by 1969 in sex ed pioneer Sweden, more than ⅓ of Swedish students
had never encountered sex ed in the classroom, even though it had been compulsory since the
1950s. Teachers admitted to being uninformed, unprepared, and sometimes embarrassed to bring
up the topic in front of students, which led them to skip over it altogether. And in 2006
90% of Swedish teachers still agreed that they had received “little or no preparation”
in teaching sex ed. And in the US similar problems persist, since the choices made in
the classroom are often left up to the discretion of local governments and oversight is extremely
localized, leading to mixed results for every student.
So early 20th century sex ed was largely about keeping armies around the world healthy, before
it evolved to include topics like pregnancy, sexuality and relationships. And if the stories
from the past sound shockingly like the same backlash that led to Dr. Elders’ firing
in 1994, it’s because attitudes towards integrating sex into general education haven’t
budged much in hundreds of years. So there you have it, you’ve learned the history
of sex ed so hopefully we won’t be doomed to repeat it because that would be way too awkward.
What do you think? Anything else to add to this story? Did you make it through the entire
episode without giggling awkwardly about something your high school sex ed teacher said in class?
Drop all of your questions and adolescent anecdotes down below. And if you like Origin
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you can head there to find more info. That’s it for now and I’ll see you guys here next week