Sex Education

Early History

Historians of education have recently pointed to “social control” as the ethos underlying various curricular innovations, and early forms of sex education amply support this claim. In 1913, the American Social Hygiene Association, finding “traditional institutions insufficient to guard youth from urban temptations,” convened doctors and social engineers to design energetic curricula to counteract growing secularism, lax social examples set by immigrant parents, and the general cultural and moral dissolution embodied by the urbanizing, diversifying society. Social hygienists aimed to safeguard adolescent chastity by regulating teenagers' sexual desires during the expanding period between puberty and marriage. While these early sex educators condemned Victorian repression for inciting deviant sexuality, they confronted the same paradox that would vex conservatives, sex education activists, and opponents alike in the coming century: By [Page 821]openly discussing sexuality, weren't sex educators encouraging sexual exploration rather than limiting it? Conservative sex educators thus exalted specifically reproductive sexuality, safe within the nuptial home, and attempted to de-eroticize their subject matter by avoiding any discussion of sexual pleasure and emphasizing rational, scientific explanations of sexuality.

These strategies hardly served to stem controversy, which has attended sex education throughout its history. The central issues that immediately emerged in response to these programs—a crusade to purge “sex hygiene and personal purity education” from the Chicago public schools in 1913 is the most famous early example—remained largely consistent throughout the 20th century. Opponents complained that educators trespassed upon the domain of the family and church, and accused sex educators of “sneaking” sex education into science and health classes, undermining parental prerogative, and corrupting innocent youth. Even in these early battles over sex education, the fraught question of who other than parents was qualified to teach children about sexuality was central. As with any innovative pedagogy, early sex educators were inexperienced with new material, yet were dealing in highly sensitive questions of morality and sexuality. In an era when the role of the school grew in children's lives, sex education was a particularly delicate area, representing to many parents a threat to their control over their children's moral development.

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