CHAPTER THREE

Sex Education and the “Sexual Revolution,” 1965–83

In 1968, the eminent anthropologist Ashley Montagu published a hopeful article hailing a recent invention: the birth control pill. A British transplant to the United States, the sixty-three-year-old Montagu had witnessed enormous technological and cultural changes during his lifetime. But most of them paled next to “The Pill,” which he called one of a half dozen “major innovations” in the history of mankind. “In its effects I believe that the pill ranks in importance with the discovery of fire, the development of the ability to make and employ tools, the evolution of hunting, the invention of agriculture, the development of urbanism, of scientific medicine, and the release and control of nuclear energy,” Montagu wrote. Emancipating women from their second-class status, the Pill would also liberate them—and men—to enjoy the pleasures of sex. But its full potential would not be realized without the guiding hand of teachers, who needed to reorient sex education away from its repressive roots and into the new dawn of freedom. “The sexual revolution should precipitate the educational revolution, which should in turn lead to the human revolution,” Montagu predicted. “The dead hand of ugly traditional beliefs (such as the nastiness and sinfulness of sex, the wickedness of premarital sex), which has been responsible for untold human tragedies, will be replaced by a new flowering of human love.”1

Four years later, another British visitor to the United States confirmed Montagu’s sense of an impending sexual and educational revolution. But Mary Whitehouse sounded a cautionary chord, warning that recent changes were eroding essential human traditions—especially family, community, and personal responsibility. For the past decade, Whitehouse had spearheaded a campaign in the United Kingdom to limit sexual imagery on the airwaves as well as sexual information in schools. But “the problems that we face in Britain are international,” she told an American audience, so they would in turn require cross-national solutions. In a tour arranged by antipornography crusader Charles Keating, whose name would become synonymous with scandal during the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, Whitehouse met with several other leading activists in America’s “New Right” as well as with Herbert Klein, communication director in Richard Nixon’s White House. She also gave dozens of speeches and interviews, calling on citizens across the United States—and around the world—to rebuff the “sexual libertarians” threatening children everywhere. “They talk about bigotry, they talk about prejudice,” Whitehouse thundered. “But there is nothing more bigoted—there is nothing more prejudiced—than the licentious people who are determined that we will go on one path, and one path only…. They’re the bigots. They’re the ones who are repressive. And not us at all.”2

Together, these passages underscore the transnational dimensions of both the “sexual revolution” and its growing body of foes in the 1960s and 1970s. Across the West, liberal intellectuals declared a new gospel of sexual freedom and called upon schools to preach the same. At the same time, conservatives in Europe and North America joined hands to defend the old verities: faith, chastity, and authority. In the so-called developing world, finally, the same technology that Ashley Montagu identified as a force of liberation—contraception—spawned a new but narrow form of sex education, centered on the concept of “population.” Stressing the social imperative for small families, schools developed “population education” courses that sometimes avoided mention of sex altogether; in the ideal, one pair of educators urged, population education would be completely “sexless.” As family planning programs mounted, advocates feared that any discussion of sexual practices among unmarried youth would hamper efforts to alter the behavior of married couples. Most of all, though, sex educators found that Montagu’s vision of personal liberation did not resonate in societies stressing communal authority and obedience. “What I miss here is a sex-affirming policy giving space for the individual’s sexuality from birth to death,” admitted a Swedish official at a 1976 workshop for sex educators in the developing world. “It is hard for people to be autonomous in cultures where autonomy seems to be of such little use.” Even as they declared a new era of sexual freedom, Western educators were distressed to discover that large parts of the planet seemed bound by the chains of the past.3

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGING

In a 1965 speech on “Youth and Sexual Behavior,” American sex education leader Mary Calderone quoted a recent hit song by a hugely popular folk artist. “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, / And don’t criticize what you can’t understand,” Bob Dylan sang. “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command, / The times they are a-changing.” He was right. Across the West—and, it appeared, in many parts of the East—sexual mores and behaviors were in flux. Surveys revealed that growing numbers of young people were having sex; in many places, venereal disease and out-of-wedlock pregnancies were also on the rise. So were pornographic images and literature, which encircled the globe as national censorship laws fell away. Coupled with antiwar protests and other youth-oriented political campaigns, the sexual revolution left young people in a “complicated state of uncertainty … on a wide international scale,” as one British commentator observed in 1969. Indeed, as a Swedish educator confirmed the following year, sexual behavior and standards were “a matter of considerable emotional charge all over the world.” So the real task for sex educators was to help develop a new set of mores, as Mary Calderone argued. Here she invoked an older and less contemporary figure in American letters, Walter Lippmann. “We are unsettled, to the very roots of our being,” Lippmann wrote, in a passage Calderone quoted. “There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn’t made for a simpler age.”⁴

Calderone’s own solution—“each must answer for himself”—simply reasked the question. The daughter of noted photographer Edward Steichen, Calderone attended medical school and became a director in the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. But her experiences in the family planning movement convinced her that Americans needed new attitudes toward sex, not simply new services or technologies. With a large bequest from the Rockefeller family, a key supporter of sex education since the early twentieth century, Calderone founded the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States in 1964 to promote more “rational” and “tolerant” viewpoints. Like other liberal educators around the world, Calderone often pointed to Sweden as a place where children learned about sex in a calm, matter-of-fact manner. But even the Swedes were divided—and confused—about the subject, as American sex educator Howard Hoyman observed. Prizing individual choice and decision making, the Swedes often declared “neutrality” on sexual issues, but they also stressed “mutual commitment and responsibility,” denouncing adultery and promiscuity. Around the world, Hoyman wrote, the “central issue” was “sexual permissiveness”: how much discretion should young people receive, and how—if at all—should adults try to guide them? Clearly, Hoyman noted, “horse and buggy sex education won’t do in the Space Age.” But it was far easier to declare a revolution than to decide what should come afterward.5

The problem was especially acute in the developing world, where the infusion of Western literature, film, and television challenged long-standing ideas of sexual reticence and continence. “Hippies, Beatles and the like [sic] of them are visiting our country every day,” an Indian educator wrote in 1969, shortly after the Beatles’ “Fab Four” departed the country. “Most of our young people are now expressing their preferences for the liberalized sex mores and decrying the rigid traditions of our own society.” To some observers, such trends merely highlighted the need for sex education as a “preventive measure” against “greater liberty and experimentation,” as another Indian wrote; more than ever before, a Kenyan educator added, young people needed instruction about sex “before the damage is done.” Echoing sex educators in the West, other commentators urged schools to develop new standards instead of simply shoring up older ones. “We have to recognize that we are living in an age and in a society in which children are almost indoctrinated with the idea of sexual satisfaction as an ultimate axiom in life,” a principal in Hong Kong underlined. But educators still ignored sex, except for periodic warnings not to engage in it. “It is a world of contradictory attitudes, sexual indoctrination by the mass media on the one hand and a conspiracy of silence by [schools] on the other,” the principal wrote. “Can we blame young people if they are confused?”6

For their own part, youth around the world demanded more discussion about sex in school. A special session on “Youth and Sex Education” at a 1967 family planning conference in Chile drew over two thousand young people, which was more than the venue could accommodate. Turned away at the door, the overflow crowd waited patiently to meet the speakers as they exited; inside, meanwhile, doctors and educators from four continents “frankly answered questions which doubtless have never before been asked at a public meeting in Latin America,” as one observer wrote. Even in the supposedly “advanced” countries of Europe and North America, however, students were alternately astonished, angered, and amused by the information—or, frequently, the mis-information—that they received about sex in their classrooms. In the Netherlands, “provos”—that is, youth rebels—demanded “honest” sex education and free contraceptives in the same breath as they denounced air pollution, South African apartheid, and the war in Vietnam. Likewise, Italian schoolgirls paraded through the streets of Rome to demand sex education alongside abortion rights. In the United States, finally, the New York Student Coalition for Relevant Sex Education demanded that each high school establish a “Rap Room” where students could receive accurate information about abortion, contraception, and other topics that the regular curriculum downplayed or ignored.⁷

In a more radical vein, meanwhile, a German student magazine suggested that schools set aside “Love Rooms” for youth to obtain “practical experience” in sex itself. “Where does one find the peace to really enjoy each other without the permanent fear of being surprised at any minute?” the magazine asked. “At home?” Denouncing the standard curriculum as dated and irrelevant, some German students even stripped to the nude to demonstrate for more explicit sex education as well as contraceptive services in schools; others simply handed out birth control pills on their own. But their philosophy of sex was often less radical—and more romantic—than these agitprop events suggested. “Love should be the only motive for sexual intercourse at the beginning,” the German student magazine editorialized. “A girl who sacrifices her virginity should only do so for the sake of love.” Most of all, students said, they simply wanted schools to address sex openly and honestly. “Too many teachers give the once-over treatment, if any treatment at all,” an American high school student conference resolved in 1966. Fourteen years later, in 1980, another group of American high schoolers confirmed that little had changed. “All they do is show the same movie we’ve seen every year,” one of the students surmised. “You don’t learn anything new.”8

SEX EDUCATION IN THE WEST: A REVOLUTION DEFERRED

As these comments illustrated, sex education changed much more slowly in the 1960s and 1970s than either the heralds or the critics of the sexual revolution imagined. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the number of children who received instruction in the subject rose steadily. By 1979, at least 90 percent of American schools provided some kind of sex education; the following year, 98 percent of British children reportedly received the same. As one British observer added, school biology courses—still the most common venue for sex education—increasingly focused on “the human reproductive system rather than that of the rabbit”; indeed, the high school biology syllabus included such formerly tabooed terms as semen, ejaculation, and ovulation. Even primary school pupils learned many of these words from sex education filmstrips and television shows produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which reached over a quarter-million children in three thousand schools by 1971. But sex education rarely moved beyond these “plumbing” lessons—as critics mockingly called them—to examine the social contexts and dilemmas of sex. Indeed, in most instances, there was no dilemma at all; even as they widened their sexual vocabulary, schools continued to instruct students to avoid sexual activity. The confused spirit of most sex education was vividly captured in American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s popular 1969 documentary, High School, which showed a visiting doctor making crude sex jokes to male students—all in the course of a lecture warning them to steer clear of sex.⁹

Elsewhere in the West, meanwhile, sex education varied with “local socio-cultural conditions,” as a 1975 study reported. The “most advanced” instruction took place in “liberal Protestant” nations, especially in Scandinavia and West Germany; the “slowest progress” was found in Catholic countries like Portugal, where high school biology textbooks still depicted human bodies without reproductive organs. French officials explicitly restricted sex education to “biological knowledge,” excluding questions of morality or values; here they drew less upon the country’s Catholic roots than on its tradition of laïcité, or state neutrality on religious matters. But even the supposedly liberal countries in northern Europe placed much more emphasis on pubertal changes and reproduction than on sexual mores and relationships, as the German example illustrates. Sex education received renewed attention with the 1967 release of Helga, a government-subsidized documentary aimed at creating a new consensus for the subject across West Germany’s different states and regions. The film opened with person-on-the-street interviews, showing adults reminiscing about their sexual ignorance as children. Then it provided the missing knowledge, including detailed descriptions of contraceptive methods and even a short clip of a live birth. As several commentators noted, though, the movie focused almost exclusively upon the biological aspects of sex; so did a subsequently released “Sex Atlas” for schools, which featured still photos from Helga. Indeed, a British journalist observed, a “Germanic coldness … ran through the entire film.”10

Over the next few months, Helga became an international sensation; grossing a surprising $4 million in Germany alone, it was also a box office hit in about a dozen other Western countries. So it highlighted contrasts between different nations’ approaches to sexuality writ large. “While the French often regard sex as a game, the Danes, as a reality, the Swedes, as poetry,” a German observer wrote, commenting on the Helga craze, “the Germans seem to regard it as something to be analyzed—and explained and explained and explained.” In the United States, where Helga’s popularity rivaled blockbusters like Paper Lion and The Boston Strangler, critics flayed the film—as well as its soft-porn sequel, Helga and the Sexual Revolution—as too “intellectual,” and too inattentive to social and emotional dynamics. Responding to such critiques, later editions of the German student “Sex Atlas” showed families playing with a newborn baby; they also discussed the working careers and parenting roles of the child’s mother and father. Likewise, courses and textbooks in the United States and United Kingdom gradually began to address “healthy relationships,” as one skeptical British author wrote in 1980, fueled by the faith that such instruction would solve everything from rising divorce rates to “football hooliganism.”11

But almost all countries continued to avoid discussion of the “Big Four” taboos, as sex educators around the world called them: abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and masturbation. Just as “Problems of Democracy” courses generally ignored actual issues of democracy, one American philosopher wrote, so did sex education eschew the “real problems” of sex. Asked by a student which contraception method he would recommend to a sixteen-year-old girl, an American teacher curtly replied, “Sleep with your grandmother”; when the girl brought birth control pamphlets to school the following day, she was told that distributing them was illegal. Meanwhile, at least 80 percent of the world’s national educational systems ignored sex altogether, as one expert estimated in 1972. The previous year, the Spanish government blocked children from watching Adiós, cigüeña, adiós (“Goodbye, Stork, Goodbye”), Spain’s first sex education movie and a hit among adults; even children who acted in the film were barred from seeing it. Three Italian girls were investigated by prosecutors and forced to undergo medical examinations after publishing a 1966 article demanding sex education; eight years later, when another group of Italian students organized their own sex education course, local parish leaders denounced it. “Catholics, let’s act and make sure that here things will not be like they are in Denmark,” a parish leaflet blared, “where Catholic families no longer send their children to state schools where they only learn immorality.”¹²

SCANDINAVIA: SYMBOL AND REALITY

To friends and foes alike, Scandinavia remained a symbol of progressive, liberal-minded sex education. International attention focused especially on Sweden, which had become the first country to require the subject back in 1956. As in the 1950s, much of this invective reflected right-wing stereotypes of “the typical Swede as a person with a bottle in one hand and a welfare check in another, wallowing in lust and sexual promiscuity, as he or she staggers along the brink of insanity and suicide,” as an American visitor quipped in 1971. But liberal sex educators and journalists across the world distorted Sweden and other Scandinavian nations, too, imagining them as united beacons of sexual openness, honesty, and dialogue. The movie Helga even included scenes from a sex education class in Sweden, asking German viewers if schools should provide Swedish-style instruction because many parents “did not know enough about their own bodies.” For most sex educators in the West, the answer was obvious: yes. American educators were especially prodigious in their praise of Sweden, noting its relatively low rates of rape, divorce, venereal disease, teen pregnancy, and abortion. They also made repeated trips to Sweden to study its sex education system and to meet with its revered leader, Elise Ottesen-Jensen, whom American allies saluted with a revealing nickname: “Great Lady.”13

Elsewhere, too, liberal correspondents and visitors hailed Swedes and other Scandinavians as the world pacesetters in sex education. A British journalist marveled at the “frankness, confidence, and objectivity” of sex instruction in Denmark, which made the subject compulsory in 1970. In Sweden, meanwhile, the office mail of the RFSU—the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education—groaned with overseas appeals for information and advice. Some correspondents requested pornography, often in the guise of edification; in Japan, for example, a young teacher asked for pictures of female genitalia and a “small model of a woman’s waist,” so he could “study more harder.” But most foreign writers requested more substantial assistance—especially textbooks, pamphlets, and posters—to help bring their own countries up to the Swedish standard. “There is no sex education in our schools due to repressive attitude of Catholic Church,” a young Irishman complained, noting the surge of teen pregnancies in Dublin; in England, meanwhile, a biology teacher asked the RFSU to help him combat sexual prudery on his own shores. “We are about 20 years behind you in our educational approach to sex and morality,” the teacher wrote. Even a sex educator in the Netherlands—which would soon join Scandinavia as a global symbol of sexual openness—praised Sweden’s progressive policies, which stood head and shoulders above Dutch ones. “Our country is too conservative with regard to the sexuality,” he groused, requesting RFSU materials. “I am very interested in your way of working … which is so far with the sexuality.”14

Scandinavian educators were more detailed and descriptive in their lessons about sex. In Denmark, for example, a junior high school textbook depicted male-female couples performing different sex acts “in softly lighted, decorously posed photographs,” as an astonished American reported. In 1965, the revised Swedish National Handbook on sex education included explicit discussions of contraception and abortion; a ninth grade test required students to define “sodomy” and “pedophilia”; and a top sex education official told a British interviewer that schools should provide “facts about sexual stimulation, sexual responses, and techniques of intercourse.” In practice, however, Swedish sex education remained far more limited than either advocates or critics assumed. Although the subject had been mandatory for over a decade, a 1967 survey reported that one-third of Swedish teenagers had not studied it; two years later, another scholar estimated that 30 to 50 percent of Swedish children received “inadequate or little or no sex education.” Moreover, the minimal instruction that students did get bore little resemblance to the candid, no-holds-barred spirit of the Scandinavian stereotype. A survey in the early 1970s showed that over half of fifteen-year-olds were still uncertain whether masturbation was “dangerous” or not; meanwhile, just over one-quarter of Swedish teachers had shown contraceptive devices to their students, as the national curriculum suggested. “Are we twenty-five years behind the Swedes?” American Lester Kirkendall asked in 1967, in the preface to a book by Swedish sex educator Birgitta Linner. “Or is it that Mrs. Linner and leaders like her are twenty-five years ahead of the rest of Sweden?”¹⁵

Commonly invoked across the West, the metaphor of the race—with some nations “ahead,” and others “behind”—assumed that everyone was running toward the same finish line. So it also distorted the purposes of sex education in Sweden, which focused less on the perils of sex—a leading theme around the globe since the early 1900s—and more on its pleasures. Put simply, sex instruction aimed to help each individual develop a sex life that was personally meaningful and satisfying, and that goal came before broader social ones, including the protection of young people from disease and unwanted pregnancy. Asked by an Irish educator in 1978 how Swedish sex instruction reduced teen pregnancy and gonorrhea rates, RFSU chairman Carl Boethius freely admitted that Swedes “do not know if these positive figures are partly due to sex education.” But nor was that the purpose of such instruction, Boethius quickly added. “PS. The fundamental reason for sex education is—according to the Swedish view—the right to knowledge, not ideas about special effects,” Boethius wrote, in a scrawled note beneath his signature. Indeed, Boethius told another correspondent two years later, “the effects of sex education have never been studied in Sweden.” The only effect that mattered was deeply personal, and probably unmeasurable. “The best contribution of sex education is that the sexual act is now more often than previously experienced as a positive factor in the total relationship by both men and women,” Boethius explained. In the past, he noted, a well-known joke held that sex was a woman’s price for marriage, and marriage was what a man paid for sex. “There is nowadays little left of this deeply unhappy attitude,” he added.16

Of course, there was no way to know whether this attitudinal change was attributable to sex education, any more than the incidence of teen pregnancy was. But Boethius’s comments spoke to the evolving goals of Swedish sex instruction, and also to the tensions between them. On the one hand, Swedes said, schools should help each individual experience sexual pleasure on his or her own terms; on the other, they should teach every individual that pleasure was a legitimate goal—even, a “right”—for all. Discarding the warnings against premarital sex that had marked older editions, the 1965 Sex Education Handbook described Sweden as a “pluralistic society … holding different views about sexual morality”; twelve years later, another revision said schools should aim to promote “sexuality as a source of happiness with another person.” But it also underscored the “common value” that everyone needed to share: the sexual sovereignty of each human being. “We do not put a stigma upon sexual relations before marriage,” a Swedish sex educator told an American correspondent in 1971. “Of course, we are presenting various kinds of questioning and a wide ideologi [sic] in these questions, but we do not press a sexual way of living as a model. The fundamental thing is that nobody should press anyone to do what he or she does not want to do.” Asked if schools should teach “a particular set of values or moral viewpoint,” another Swedish sex educator answered simply: no. “Who knows what are the right attitudes to develop in the young?” she replied.17

THE CONSERVATIVE COUNTERREVOLUTION

To many adults, in Sweden and around the world, that question also had a simple answer: parents know. From its inception, of course, sex education had tried to supplant parental authority by intervening directly in a matter that was formerly reserved for families. But the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s heightened that tension, bringing more and more citizens into conflict with their schools. Ironically, sex educators often framed their project as a way to tame and discipline the more unseemly aspects of the revolution, especially the growing commercial trade of sexual images in advertising, film, and television; according to one Scottish advocate, school-based sex instruction would “meet the manifest needs of adolescents to be armed against the blandishments of the permissive-acquisitive society.” But to its growing cadre of conservative critics, sex education was a product of the same permissive trends it purportedly sought to halt. “Some educators say that we must have sex education because society is over-heated on the subject,” an American pastor told his church in a 1969 sermon. “But why are the schools seeking to add more fuel to the fire?” Modern society “already has a preoccupation with sex,” he added, so “it would appear to be compounding the problem to install sex in the classroom as well.” Indeed, a member of Great Britain’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVLA) averred, sex education reflected “the filthiness of the Permissive Society.” Reversing these trends would require nothing less than a worldwide “sexual counter-revolution,” the group’s founder added.18

The founder’s name was Mary Whitehouse, who was immortalized in a 1977 song by the British rock band Pink Floyd. “Hey you, Whitehouse / Ha ha, charade you are,” the band jibed. “You gotta stem the evil tide / And keep it all on the inside.” In the eyes of her liberal detractors, Whitehouse epitomized traditional middle-class British prudery, but she also became a hero to right-wing foes of the sexual revolution, first in the United Kingdom and then around the globe. Whitehouse was a schoolteacher in the 1930s and again in the 1950s and early 1960s, when she noticed that students were mimicking the new sexual banter they heard on the radio and television. She went on to create the NVLA, which focused most of its early fire on the British Broadcasting Corporation; when the BBC began producing filmstrips and TV shows for sex instruction in schools, Whitehouse started campaigning against sex education as well. Critics on the left condemned the BBC series as both too elliptical and too didactic; concealing or omitting important topics, it imposed a singular moral code that ignored human change and complexity. But to Whitehouse and her legions of followers, sex education was too detailed and not moralistic enough. “Your organisation is indeed extremely important at this moment of time, as a ‘voice’ for those thousands of decent folk, bewildered by the crude pressures on our sensibilities,” a British physician wrote Whitehouse in 1972. “I feel so sorry for the generation of teen-agers and what has been done to them in the name of ‘liberation.’”¹⁹

Hundreds of similar missives arrived from elsewhere in Europe and North America, illustrating the increasingly cross-national character of the campaign against sex education. “It is like the Battle of Britain all over again,” a Canadian correspondent wrote Whitehouse, offering to come to the United Kingdom to assist her. “If England stands and recovers the whole world has a chance of returning to sanity.” Just as sex education supporters sought advice from the RFSU in Sweden, meanwhile, so did opponents write to Whitehouse and the NVLA for guidance on how to fight the subject in their own countries. Still others asked to join hands across borders and oceans, noting that a truly international crisis—the sexual revolution—would also require an international solution. “The big thing is that we all compare notes, ideas and thinking, and work as hard as we can to bring sanity to all our countries,” American activist Martha Rountree told Whitehouse. She was “not talking about one world,” Rountree quickly added, echoing the right-wing fear of the United Nations and “one-world government” during these years; nations will always exist, she emphasized, and it was “not realistic or expedient” to imagine otherwise. “But, if the right people in every Nation work together … the voice of the people in the world can bring about miracles,” she explained. “And, when I refer to the right people, I mean those who believe in God and their Country, who believe in the family unit, who hold high moral and ethical standards above the temptations that beckon at every turn.” Rountree urged Whitehouse to make another voyage to America, where they could “settle the world’s problems” together.20

Here she alluded to Whitehouse’s highly publicized 1972 visit to the United States, sponsored by an American group called Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL) and its energetic founder, Charles Keating. A member of President Nixon’s National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, Keating—like Whitehouse—had entered the political arena to fight sexual imagery in mass media; now he, too, was turning to sex education in the schools. At Whitehouse’s request, Keating had given the keynote address at the NVLA’s 1970 convention in the United Kingdom. Two years later he returned the invitation, organizing a whirlwind two-week North American tour for Mary Whitehouse. Her schedule for the trip reads like a veritable Who’s Who list of the burgeoning American New Right, featuring meetings with antiabortion crusader Phyllis Schlafly, journalist Fulton Lewis, and Catholic archbishop Fulton Sheen. “If ‘epistle’ is the feminine of ‘apostle’—then—you are a great epistle,” Sheen told her. Whitehouse also reunited with California congressman and conservative firebrand Robert Dornan, who had already met her during his own trip to the United Kingdom. Compared to Whitehouse’s expansive efforts, Dornan complained, the American New Right fell short. “He wonders—as I do—where is the Mary Whitehouse of America?” wrote CDL director Raymond Gauer, after talking with Dornan. “We sorely need a woman who can speak out intelligently, reasonably, forcibly and articulately against immorality.” Gauer added a nod to Carrie Nation, the nineteenth-century American prohibitionist who made her name attacking saloons with an axe. “That’s what we need today!” he exclaimed.21

Whitehouse also traveled several times to Australia and New Zealand, under the auspices of the Festival of Light (FOL). Founded in London in 1971 by Whitehouse and several conservative compatriots, the FOL lit bonfires around the coastline of England to warn of “moral decay”—just as people did centuries earlier, to alert residents to threats of the Spanish Armada. Building on contemporary left-wing refrains, Whitehouse thrilled Australian audiences with her appeals to “people power” and “participatory democracy”; she also invoked the liberal-leaning environmental movement, calling on citizens around the globe to stamp out “moral pollution” alongside the industrial kind. New Zealand hosted representatives from another British anti-sex-education group, The Responsible Society, who warned listeners against going down “the slippery slope Britain has descended”; in Australia, meanwhile, visiting conservative luminaries from the United States—including Schlafly, Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, and Republican strategist Paul Weyrich—assisted in campaigns against abortion, pornography, and homosexual rights as well as against sex education. By the early 1980s, an appalled sex educator observed, right-wing groups in Australia had adopted many of the same “inventive acronyms” and “anything-goes tactics” that marked conservatives in America. Most of all, the campaign against sex education borrowed key conceptual frameworks from the Americans. “He who frames the issues helps to determine the outcome of the debate,” Weyrich told an Australian audience.²²

POWER TO THE PARENTS?

The most important frame concerned parents’ right to educate their children, which had undergirded opposition to sex instruction since the early 1900s. But it assumed a new resonance in the 1960s and 1970s, when several well-publicized disputes about parental rights galvanized foes of sex education around the world. The most important case came out of Denmark, where three sets of parents—including two teachers and two clerics—entered a complaint about sex education before the European Court of Human Rights in 1971. The previous year, Denmark had mandated the subject for all children, as early as age seven but no later than nine; it further specified that sex education should be “integrated” across the curriculum, rather than taught in a separate course. But that feature made it impossible to withdraw children from sex education lessons, which the complaining parents described as “vulgar” and contrary to their “Christian outlook.” It also violated Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights, the parents said, which held that “no person shall be denied the right to education” and that “the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.” In reply, the Danish government noted that parents remained free to educate their children at home or at parochial schools, which were heavily subsidized by the state; it also argued that schools took a strictly “factual approach” to sexual matters, providing students with information but allowing parents “to implant their own moral viewpoints in their children.”23

The European Court ruled against the plaintiffs in Kjeldsen, Busk Madsen and Pedersen v. Denmark (1976) by a vote of 8 to 7, the slimmest possible margin. Reviewing the Danish sex education curriculum, the court held that it did not constitute “indoctrination” of a “specific kind of sexual behaviour,” nor did it “affect the right of parents to enlighten and advise their children.” At the same time, however, the court warned that schools “must take care that information or knowledge is conveyed in an objective, critical, and pluralistic manner” that respects “parents’ religious and philosophical convictions.” The decision outraged right-wing parents in Denmark, who had previously formed a group called National Protection against the Indoctrination of Children, using the Danish acronym LIBER; after the European court’s ruling, members fanned out to other countries to warn about the impending assault on parental prerogatives. In a letter to the queen of England, LIBER chairman Svend Laursen described the decision as “a stunning blow against the parents who believed in human rights”; in New Zealand, he exhibited allegedly “pornographic” European textbooks and lectured on “The Danish middle classes versus sex education”; and he appealed the Kjeldsen decision to the United Nations, citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ passage that parents have a “prior right” to choose their children’s education. “It is clear to us that this issue is not confined to Denmark,” a British sex education critic surmised, “but is of prime concern to Christian parents, and to others with traditional family standards, throughout the world.”24

A few years earlier, Great Britain had been gripped by a similar controversy. In 1970, the parents of four teenaged girls complained about their school’s use of a BBC sex education film. After promising the parents that the film would be shown outside of regular class hours, the school proceeded to show it to the entire student body; even worse, the four girls were called to the front of the room, told that their parents disapproved of the film, and sent home. Their father contacted his Member of Parliament, who said British parents did not possess the right to remove their children from disagreeable lessons; educational secretary and future prime minister Margaret Thatcher confirmed that claim, noting her own reservations about BBC’s sex education films (which, she said, did not give sufficient attention to “love and marriage”) but insisting that “there is no legal right of withdrawal” from the subject. Eventually, the parents decided to remove their four girls from the school entirely. “I submit that teaching captive audiences in schools, during compulsory education, sexual attitudes which are known to be repugnant to [the] conscience of many parents is tyranny, and should be prohibited,” the girls’ father declared.²⁵

The issue eventually worked its way into Parliament, generating several fiery and well-publicized debates. “Have parents no rights? Are they to be ridden roughshod over by the trendy educational fringe?” one member of the House of Lords asked in 1976. “Parents may withdraw their child from religious education, but not from sex education, even though it may be taught in a manner which is repugnant to them.” In 1980, another conservative peer proposed a measure requiring head teachers to give parents prior notice of sex education—and allowing parents to withdraw their children from it. But the amendment was quashed by liberal legislators, who feared that it would put teachers and children alike at the mercy of “ill-judged parents,” as one peer noted. “I think it is unrealistic as well as rather unfair to say that parents should deal with this problem,” another lord noted, “because often, with the best will in the world, parents are unable to do so.” Here she took a page from sex educators themselves, who often cited parental ignorance and inadequacy as the prime reason that schools needed to step into the breach. But that was deeply insulting to many citizens, as a Catholic bishop—and sex education opponent—replied. “The BBC decides that parents are not adult enough to do this,” he blared. “It makes a take-over bid, beaming their programme directly to the children.” A conservative newspaper columnist—and mother—agreed. “We are mostly quite capable of doing the job perfectly adequately ourselves,” she wrote, “in spite of what Auntie B.B.C. and the ‘experts’ think.”26

Only in the United States—with its deep-rooted traditions of lay and local school control—did parents win real authority to exempt their children from sex education. By 1980, nine states specifically decreed that parents could withdraw children from the subject; five others required written parental consent before students could receive it. But that still meant that millions of children could receive the subject against their parents’ will, as sex education critics pointed out; in New York State, most notably, Governor Hugh Carey vetoed a parental-withdrawal measure because it could “close young people off from the sex information they need,” as one educator argued. Critics also lost bids in at least six state courts to declare sex education unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds, as a violation of families’ religious freedoms; and twice, in 1970 and 1976, the Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that rejected such claims. But parents continued to insist that they—not educators—should have the final word on sex instruction for their children. “It’s our child, our family,” one parent declared, in a typical jeremiad. “My authority comes before the school’s authority.” Indeed, both sides of the debate acknowledged that it was never just about the birds and the bees. “It is, as our enemies say, more than a matter of sex education,” wrote right-wing activist Gordon Drake in 1969. “It is a question of who will run the schools.”²⁷

CHILDREN AND SEXUALITY

It was also a question about children, and whether they were naturally sexual beings. The issue had hounded sex education since the early 1900s, when supporters invoked Sigmund Freud’s concept of infant sexual instincts; to its critics, meanwhile, sex education would corrupt otherwise sexually innocent youth. But the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s—especially the new frankness about the subject in mass media—underscored the question of child sexuality as never before. “For heaven’s sake, don’t bombard youngsters with long diatribes about sex at the period in their lives when keeping their ears free from potato crops and their shoes nicely polished is their first priority,” wrote a critic of the BBC sex education films in Glasgow, which voted not to show the films in schools; according to the head of a primary school that also rejected the films, they would cause children to take a “morbid introspective interest in their own development.” In the United States, likewise, parents complained that a sex education movie disclosed grown-up secrets to previously innocent children. “Now our kids know what a shut bedroom door means,” one mother protested. “The program is taking their childhood away.” Girls were walking around with apples and oranges under their blouses, another mother grumbled, while a third was appalled when her son said, “Guess what, next week our teacher’s gonna tell us how daddy fertilized you.”28

To sex educators, of course, such episodes simply confirmed children’s natural interest in sex—as well as their parents’ unnatural anxieties about it. Indeed, they demonstrated the ongoing need for schools to break the “vicious circle” of silence and fear that still surrounded the subject. Several American cities hosted revivals of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, the fin de siècle German tragedy of youth sexual anguish that remained “surprisingly undated” in the 1970s, as one theater critic wrote. “The pains of adolescence are still great,” he added, “and the horrors of repression, emotional and physical, are still very real.” Other educators noted new scientific evidence of sexual arousal from birth and even before, as fetal erections seemed to suggest. Still others pointed to survey data collected from children themselves, who thought and knew much more about sex than many adults imagined. Most of all, educators mocked the continued conservative assumption—reaching back to the early 1900s, but revived in the 1960s and 1970s—that sex education would encourage students to engage prematurely in sexual activity. “How does one persuade irrational people bent on their own irrationality to accept the single fact that concurrence of two happenings does not necessarily indicate causality of or by either?” exasperated American sex educator Mary Calderone asked an Australian counterpart. “If I take an aspirin in the morning and drop dead at noon, surely the aspirin caused my death?”29

Especially in the 1970s, finally, some educators started to suggest that children’s sexual nature implied a right to receive sex education, or even to pursue sexual pleasure. To be sure, the mere mention of pleasure remained taboo in most schools outside of Scandinavia. Not surprisingly, then, Scandinavian and especially Swedish educators took the lead in promulgating the idea of “sexual knowledge as a human right,” as a Swedish speaker told a 1970 conference in Austria. Since this instruction was truly a “moral right,” another Swede told a London audience the following year, schools did not allow parents to withdraw their offspring from it; “schools are for children,” she flatly declared, “not parents.” The concept proved irresistible to sex educators elsewhere in Europe and in North America, where parental objections constantly stymied them. It also spawned a set of conferences and resolutions in the late 1970s and early 1980s, all devoted to establishing sexual knowledge—and, increasingly, sexual pleasure—as a basic right. Meeting in 1979, the “International Year of the Child,” educators in Mexico City, Tel Aviv, Montreal, and York, England, debated a resolution on the “Sexual Rights of Children”; that same year, an international meeting in Uppsala, Sweden, affirmed that “it is the right of every individual to live in an environment of freely available information, knowledge, and wisdom about human sexuality.” In 1983, finally, the World Health Organization (WHO) endorsed a similar set of statements in its “Consultation on Sexuality”:

At present, it is not possible to define the totality of human sexuality in a form that would be acceptable to all countries, but every person has a right to receive sexual information and to consider accepting sexual relationships for pleasure as well as for procreation.

Sexuality starts at birth, if not earlier in the foetus. Masturbation and sexual play in children are normal and healthy activities, but children in most countries suffer from sexual repression…. Children as well as adults require support to be able to feel enjoyment as sexual beings.

By 1995, in every country at least 80 percent of the people … will have an opportunity of leading an emotionally satisfying sexual life in harmony with the needs, beliefs, and values of the individual and society.30

In reply, conservatives also invoked the rights of children—to remain sexually innocent. Especially after the Kjeldsen decision, which limited parental rights, they often cited the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959): “The child shall enjoy special protection … to enable him to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, and socially.” Sex education allegedly violated that credo by exposing children to material that threatened their well-being. Others rejected the entire concept of a universal “right” to sexual information and particularly to sexual pleasure, noting—correctly—that many cultures and societies around the world simply did not recognize such a thing. Even within European democracies, sex education caused “considerable distress” for “orthodox Muslim and Hindu families,” as a British observer wrote; in Sweden, likewise, the burgeoning Yugoslav community often rejected sex education along with “the Swedish pattern of sexuality and sexual relations,” as an RFSU official noted. And when Western sex educators left the West, they found similar resistance to their own liberal consensus on sex instruction for children. “The weight of tradition seems oppressive,” wrote American Lester Kirkendall in 1972, after a three-month speaking tour in Japan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. “Many of my suggestions were countered with the argument that ‘we can’t do it that way in our culture.’” Japan’s “Chastity and Purity Education” (as it was known) preached strict sexual abstinence, while Filipino educators provided only small snippets of sexual information in their “population education” course. In their voyages overseas, especially, Western sex educators would have to confront the enormous diversity of human sexuality—and the limits of any shared approach to the same.31

EXPORTING SEX EDUCATION: AMERICA, SWEDEN, AND THE WORLD

Kirkendall traveled to “the Orient” (as he called it) under the auspices of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, which developed several overseas outreach projects in the 1970s and 1980s. So did a handful of other private groups and foundations, continuing the long tradition of voluntary-organization assistance pioneered by the American Social Hygiene Association (renamed the American Social Health Association) in the 1940s and 1950s. The Ford Foundation aided sex education groups in several Latin American countries, including Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Colombia; it also funded a trailblazing 1973 conference in Mali on sex education in sub-Saharan Francophone Africa, organized by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The AFSC, meanwhile, advised sex education advocates in Hong Kong, Uganda, and across Latin America. In Honduras, it sponsored a weeklong sex education course for five hundred primary school teachers; it also paid for several Mexican teachers to attend a workshop on the subject at Catholic University in Washington, DC. For the first time, finally, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) also began to promote and develop sex education abroad. In 1968, most prominently, Chile’s Ministry of Education signed an agreement with USAID to train two thousand teachers in the subject by 1971. The pact also paid for several Chileans—including President Eduardo Frei’s daughter—to visit the United States and Sweden to observe sex education classes there.³²

Sweden hosted hundreds of other visitors as part of its overseas efforts, which began with an RFSU-sponsored “International Symposium on Sexology” in 1969. The event drew 105 applications from educators, physicians, and public officials in twenty-two different countries, who competed for just thirty slots; rejected applicants included Filipino senator and future president Benigno S. Aquino, who received summaries of the conference’s lectures after it concluded. The RFSU sponsored a second symposium in 1971, when it also welcomed a delegation of twenty-eight Japanese high school teachers who were “seeking how to diffuse the sex education” in their own country, as their travel agent wrote. “The problem of sex in Japan is still in a very ‘Dark Continent,’” a Japanese visitor wrote. “The most useful and helpful way to have a solution in this matter is to go to the European countries to study and research their advanced present conditions and introduce it in Japan.” Like USAID, meanwhile, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency—the government’s foreign-aid arm—developed several overseas sex education initiatives in the 1970s. The agency hosted three seminars for Latin American and Caribbean sex educators, which featured frank discussions with Swedish officials and students. “I know that there are many countries with more restrictive attitudes … but I cannot believe we are different from people in other parts of the world,” a nineteen-year-old Swedish student told the second seminar, in 1972. “We are the same humans I think.”33

A similarly universalistic spirit marked sex education efforts by international organizations, where Swedes and other Scandinavians often played leading roles. The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) held its first-ever session on “Youth and Sex Education” in 1967, drawing an overflow crowd to hear talks by RFSU founder Elise Ottesen-Jensen and by Danish educator Agnette Braestrup; countering the idea that sex education was “dangerous,” Braestrup noted that students in Denmark received it “with neither the teacher nor the children becoming excited.” The key was to discover a “globally common denominator for sex education,” as Swedish psychiatrist and IPPF president Thorsten Sjövall told the group in 1970. “Who needs sex education?” asked Sjövall, who also served as the RFSU’s president. “All nations and all individuals at all ages need it; there are no developed or developing countries in this particular respect.” Associations affiliated with the United Nations also entered the sex education arena during these years, often under the leadership of Scandinavians. “The idea of an education designed to form and set free the individual personality is implicit in the concept of sex education,” a UNESCO regional conference for Latin America resolved in 1971, echoing a common Swedish refrain. So did a WHO meeting in 1979, which stressed “the positive aspect of sexuality” rather than “negative” elements like the prevention of pregnancy and VD.34

SEX EDUCATION AND FAMILY PLANNING IN THE “THIRD WORLD”

But sex education took root slowly—if at all—in the “Third World,” as Westerners called it, belying their dreams of a truly worldwide educational revolution. Like critics in the West, many citizens in Asia, Africa, and Latin America objected to the public discussion of formerly tabooed topics in schools; others were more specifically repelled by the idea of female sexual independence, as a Ford Foundation official in Senegal noted. In Mexico, similarly, “the entire culture … is still permeated by attitudes intended to emphasize the role of women as sexual playthings of men or as mothers,” a local educator wrote; at its root, she added, sex education threatened the idea that females should be “subservient” to men. Most of all, Third World educators and families rejected the idea of adolescent autonomy—for both genders—in sexual decision making. In Ghana, where a church council introduced public school sex education, curricula stressed teen abstinence above all. “The marriage bed should be without wrinkles,” a science teacher wrote in 1965, summarizing the “exhortation and warning” that students received. “Boy and girl should be virgins at the time of marriage.” The following year, when a coup toppled Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah, his enemies pointed to youth sexual laxity as a central cause of the country’s woes. “Morals were so low that adultery and fornication … became a shameless social practice,” a church group told the National Liberation Council, which replaced Nkrumah. Only the “right type of education” would save youth from “immorality and debauchery,” the group added.35

In the early 1970s Ghanaian sex instruction shifted from religious to family-planning auspices, reflecting another important global trend. “In most countries, sex education programmes are regarded as an essential part of family planning programmes,” declared the Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana in 1971, inaugurating a new “Family Life Education” initiative; by 1975, the group was conducting FLE in forty schools for ten thousand students. Elsewhere, too, some family-planning officials and advocates embraced sex education as one of the keys to defusing the “Population Bomb” that supposedly threatened the planet’s future. As an Indian family-planning official explained, successful population-control efforts required “changing the subtle human attitudes,” not just “importing contraceptive technology”; and these attitudes would never alter without “sound sex education,” as a family-planning proponent in Uruguay added. “When the mechanics of birth control information are introduced to people, it is found they have many questions, hang-ups, nutty or hostile ideas about morality,” a Ford Foundation official in Latin America wrote. “Much of this, of course, is rooted in the sniggering or frightening attitudes about sex.” Unless children learned new values and perspectives at an early age, he warned, the foundation’s population-control efforts would “fall on stony ground.”³⁶

But when sex education became too closely linked in the public mind with family planning, both projects often descended into disrepute. As their name suggested, “family planning” and “planned parenthood” were “directed only towards married couples,” as an Indian government leaflet emphasized; if they became associated with sexual activity outside of families, advocates feared, they would lose whatever tenuous public support they had gained. Especially in Asia and Africa, many family-planning organizations sought to “desexualize” themselves—as one American observer quipped—by eschewing sex education altogether. At the same time, sex educators discovered that any visible link to family planning or birth control services could doom their efforts. Korean parents resisted sex education out of fear that it would teach contraception, which they associated with Japanese efforts to control their population—especially via abortion—during and before World War II; educators in West Africa warned that any mention of birth control in classrooms could violate France’s 1920 law prohibiting public discussion of the subject, which was still on the books in many former French colonies; and in El Salvador, where a 1972 presidential decree called for training two thousand teachers in “family education,” participants warned that any connection to family planning would “violate or offend the socio-cultural sensibilities of the Salvadoran people.” Especially in heavily Catholic Latin America, another observer wrote from Colombia, such terms bore “a ‘North American’ label … which is another cause of resistance.”37

POPULATION EDUCATION

So sex educators and family-planning advocates went in search of another phrase, which would avoid both the lascivious, pleasure-seeking tone of “sex” and the coercive, secularizing connotations of “family planning.” They found it in population education, which became the most common venue for sex education in many parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The concept was actually born in Sweden, where the 1935 Population Commission called on schools to help increase the nation’s moribund birth rate by encouraging early marriage and larger families. American demographer Frank Lorimer and military official Frederick Osborn urged a similar educational effort in 1943, fearing that declining fertility rates in North America and Europe threatened economic prosperity and national security. But when population education resurfaced in the 1960s, it had the opposite goal: to stem population growth. Building on the burgeoning environmental movement, American educators urged schools to teach about “overpopulation” and its “disastrous consequences for mankind”: pollution, famine, and war. The effort yielded scattered pilot projects in the United States, but little else; instead, it took hold abroad. “We must have experience here before trying to export,” a skeptical American observer cautioned in 1971, noting the low level of domestic interest in population education. “If we cannot convince a State Department of Education, how can we convince LDCs?”38

The acronym “LDCs” referred to Lesser Developed Countries, where advocates found a much more amenable audience for population education. Indeed, another American asserted in 1971, population education was “unique” insofar as it was “not a curricular pattern being exported from technologically developed societies to developing countries.” He was only half right. Although population education never took root in US schools, Americans—and, especially, American foundations—played a key role in planting it overseas, fired by a fear of overpopulation. In their public pronouncements, officials from the “Big Three” foundations—Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie—warned that unchecked population growth would yield mass starvation and disease; privately, they worried that nonwhite people would overcome white ones. At the same time, though, they realized that population control could not succeed unless it appealed to the very populations whose growth they dreaded. Population education would get Third World people to want smaller families, the foundations hoped, even as it protected the West’s hegemony over the wider human family. In some countries, one Ford Foundation official wrote, Americans might collaborate with “responsible public sector organizations” to promote population education. But in places where “the public sector is not ready,” he added, foundations could partner with friendly private organizations. As in the United States, another Ford representative wrote, “enlightened” people favored sex and population education and “unenlightened” people did not. The key was to locate and cultivate the first group and avoid alienating the second, both inside government agencies and beyond them.³⁹

Here the foundations often partnered with American universities, a centerpiece of the “Big Three” vision of global progress and modernization. Funded by two large grants from the Population Council, which had been founded in the 1950s by John D. Rockefeller III, Teachers College (TC) at Columbia University worked with ministries of education in nine Third World countries to develop curricula and train teachers in population education. As the subject became more popular abroad, TC faculty also consulted on it with UNESCO and the United Nations Family Planning Association; closer to home, they hosted dozens of foreign students who came to learn about population education. Harvard’s own “pop-ed cadre” (as its members called themselves) designed and evaluated a “population awareness” course in Cali, Colombia, with the support of the Population Council; the University of Michigan sponsored a similar project in Baroda, India, under a Ford Foundation grant; and at the University of North Carolina, which offered the world’s first master’s degree in population education, scholars developed materials for India, Chile, Nigeria, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. By 1971, one Indian expert estimated, twenty countries already had an “active programme” in population education.40

But other countries resisted the subject, dismissing population education as a “euphemism for sex education.” The remark reflected an ongoing dilemma for educators in the Third World, who often tried to teach the benefits of small families while avoiding the question of where families came from, or how they might remain small. Indeed, some advocates warned, “population education would be killed (or even aborted) if it is combined with sex education,” as American demographer Edward W. Pohlman and his Indian counterpart K. Seshagiri Rao claimed. Sex education arose in the West to stem venereal disease and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, they argued, which were not large-scale dangers in countries like India; the real peril was the skyrocketing birthrate, a “matter of life-or-death urgency” that could only be arrested by teaching children to limit their fertility as adults. “Music is wonderful, but the man entering a life-boat to escape a sinking ship may miss the boat completely if he insists on taking his grand piano along,” Pohlman and Rao explained. “Half a chappati is better than no roti.” When students asked, “If small families are good, how can you stop babies from coming?” teachers could simply reply that they were barred from answering the question; or they could ask the students to discuss it outside of class. “‘Sexless’ population education is possible,” Pohlman and Rao concluded. “The notion that one cannot teach population education without teaching sex is ridiculous.”⁴¹

But to other educators, the idea of separating population from sex was ridiculous—and, even more, duplicitous. “The development of population education exclusive of planned instruction about biology, reproduction, sexual behavior, contraception … is tomato soup without the tomatoes,” wrote a USAID advisor in India, invoking a different culinary metaphor. “‘Sexless’ population education [is] intellectually dishonest in the first instance and foolhardy in the second.” It was hardly clear that Indians would reject sex education, as Pohlman and Rao assumed; indeed, an Indian family-planning advocate reported, one survey found that upwards of 90 percent of high school girls supported instruction about “reproductive physiology” and “family living.” In Latin America, meanwhile, the phrase “population education”—like “family life education”—sometimes carried a greater stigma than sex education; it was associated with “population control education,” one observer underlined, which was taboo in the region. Most of all, though, critics argued that population education simply would not work. Even in “developed” countries with high literacy levels, Sweden’s Thorsten Sjövall noted, people were not swayed by “demographic tables” showing runaway fertility rates; all that mattered were “concrete human needs,” including “sexual harmony” and personal well-being. “The present attempts at introducing so-called ‘population education’ at the state school level seems to me pathetically euphemistic for the badly needed instruction of more immediate facts of life,” Sjövall told the IPPF. “Man has a fundamental right to knowledge about his immediate self.”42

In reply, some advocates of population education noted that it did appeal to students’ immediate needs. As Pohlman and Rao argued, population education teaches “the meaning of large or small families, and of later or earlier marriage, to the individual …. Here are the effects on you.” In a very different kind of defense, others argued that population education did not seek to lower family size; it simply sought to “present both sides” of the question, as the Population Council’s Stephen Viederman argued, so children could come to their own reasoned judgments. But Viederman also assumed that children who truly reasoned would share his judgment, a foible of liberal educators everywhere. “Students are perhaps more likely to make societally correct decisions in open-ended programs, than if they are simply told what is societally correct,” he wrote. “Whether this open-ended approach is viable and valuable in the developing world is a matter for each country to decide for itself, depending upon the values and traditions of the educational system.” Even in the supposedly “value-fair” United States, another American admitted, such debate “rarely happens” in school, and if the debate was truly “open-minded,” he added, some students might end up taking a “pro-natalist position.” For exactly that reason, two Filipino educators admitted, most population education openly “indoctrinated” the virtues of small families. “There is a problem, that problem is population growth, and that growth must be curbed,” they categorically declared.43

Moreover, as the Filipino example also demonstrated, sexual information and discussion was often woven into population education. The Philippines’ national population education curriculum included units on human sexuality, which would “favorably affect the future fertility behavior of students,” as another pair of educators confidently predicted. In Mexico, likewise, the 1977 Population Law called for sex education—including “explicit information” on bodily changes and functions—as a route to “a more rational and responsible way of facing reproduction.” In practice, however, many teachers downplayed or ignored the sexual dimensions of population, for fear of alienating parents and other constituents. Quoting Thorsten Sjövall, an American teacher in Tunisia privately confessed that she wished to “call a cat a cat” and teach sex education. But she ultimately decided to omit it from her “dynamics of population” course, for fear of alienating her conservative hosts. So did many teachers in other places that had adopted population education, if they knew about the subject at all. In a 1976 survey of rural teachers in India, which had instituted population education seven years earlier, 40 percent said they had not even heard of the term. A whopping 88 percent opposed instruction of the subject, which they associated strongly with sex education; indeed, nearly half of the objectors condemned population education on the grounds that “we do not want children to experiment with sex.”⁴⁴

TEACHERS, CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE (AGAIN)

No matter what it was called, teachers around the world continued to resist sex education in the 1960s and 1970s. Even in the West—and even at the height of the so-called sexual revolution—teachers who addressed sex risked losing their livelihoods, or even their liberty. In France, a twenty-eight-year-old philosophy teacher was charged in 1972 with “outrage against morals” after she shared an evocatively titled pamphlet—“Let Us Learn to Make Love”—with her high school students. Condemning “hypocritical moral authorities” for “the repression of desires,” the pamphlet endorsed male-female sexual experimentation as well as masturbation (which “can fill the emptiness of an hour’s class or a boring evening”). It made little difference to the arresting authorities that the teacher shared the pamphlet in response to a student’s request during a lesson about Sigmund Freud, or that the class voted unanimously to read it. “This is not sex education!” a local official thundered. “This is an invitation to debauchery!” After students went out on strike in support of the teacher, the morals charge against her was dismissed. But other teachers still feared that they would be dismissed for teaching about sex. A 1973 government decree that allowed them to address “facts of human reproduction”—but barred them from “moralizing” about the same—did little to quell teachers’ worries. Where did facts end and morals begin? Nobody could be sure. In 1976, a nineteen-year-old student teacher was expelled from his teacher-training college when a janitor heard him discussing sex with his high school class. In France, which other nations continued to see as a hotbed of sexual license, the better part of wisdom was to ignore sex education altogether.45

The pressures on teachers were probably even greater in the United States and the United Kingdom, where local control of education made them more vulnerable to “small but vocal publics,” as a Swedish transplant to the United States observed. A married British student teacher was expelled from her own training college in 1969 for answering a pupil’s question about the birth control pill; five years later, a sixteen-year veteran of the New York City schools was placed on administrative leave for showing his class a sex education filmstrip—produced by health educators at New York University—that included pictures of intercourse and oral sex. The teacher was also investigated by the local district attorney, who grudgingly dropped the case when he discovered that the “sex film” was legal in schools; ironically, he argued, showing the same movie to minors in a pornography house would be a crime! But no educator could miss his overall message: when it comes to sex, proceed with the strictest caution. “What shall be taught? Who is to teach it?” a California journalist wrote, examining attacks on sex education in 1975. “Hands off seems to be the wisest approach.” After the New Zealand government issued a circular warning that it was illegal to discuss contraceptives in schools—and urging teachers to respect students’ “sensitivities” and “ethical and religious beliefs”—a national teachers union advised members to avoid the subject whenever they could. “Adverse gossip, or the slightest innuendo of possible impropriety, could bring professional disaster,” a British headmaster wrote, summarizing the sex education situation. “Consequently, many teachers have abstained.”46

But most teachers did not abstain from sex itself, of course, which made teaching about the subject all the more problematic. Although people disagreed about whether children were sexual beings, nobody doubted that teachers were. So anything teachers said about the subject addressed their own erotic behavior and proclivities, at least indirectly. Around the world, sex education teachers were alternately accused of being too sexual—or not sexual enough. In Ghana, parents charged that male teachers discussed the subject in order to seduce female students; in India, critics worried that “those who are most enthusiastic may be the least suitable” to teach sex education. “These one-track-mind teachers who cannot raise their minds above their belts should be put right back where they belong—and that isn’t teaching in the schools,” an outraged Australian conservative complained, after her twelve-year-old granddaughter was asked to draw a penis and vagina for homework. On the left, by contrast, critics feared that teachers lacked the sexual awareness—or, even, the sexual experience—to instruct the subject. They took aim especially at so-called old maids, the “dried up spinstery old things” (as a Swedish teenager complained) who had never married. “Some youngsters have more sex life in one weekend than their sex education teacher has had in a lifetime,” warned Dr. David Reuben, author of the best-selling US book Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask. In the United Kingdom, another physician insisted that “anyone who has not experienced satisfaction or has a distaste of sex is hardly competent to teach it.”⁴⁷

Still others worried that sex education teachers had had the wrong kind of sexual experience—with members of the same sex. In the United States, Florida and California both considered measures that would have barred gays from teaching in the public schools; in each case, part of the worry was that they would seduce children via sex education classes. Even opponents of such restrictions agreed that homosexuals “may not be the best instructors for sex education,” as the liberal New York Times suggested in an editorial denouncing the widespread dismissal of gay teachers around the country; in gay-friendly San Francisco, likewise, city supervisor (and future senator) Dianne Feinstein blasted a campaign by homosexual teachers and students to include “gay life and other human diversities” in sex education. “It could open the door to the worst kind of experimentation,” Feinstein warned. “Gays should not be harassed (for their sexual preference) but it’s reached the point where their lifestyles are imposing on others.” In the United Kingdom’s House of Lords, meanwhile, one peer likened gay sex educators to homosexual British diplomats who had committed “treason by sodomy” by sharing classified secrets with the Soviet Union. And in New Zealand, finally, right-wing activist Bernard Moran warned that “gay teachers” were “champing [sic] at the bit” to teach sex education. But their version of the subject would alienate the nation’s Maori minority as well as recent Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese immigrants, Moran cautioned. “We live in a multicultural and pluralistic society,” he added, borrowing a favorite liberal trope. “Classroom persuasion by trendy teachers that human sexuality involves a good time and being responsible through using contraceptives, would be complete anathema to most Asian parents.”48

SEX EDUCATION AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION: REAPING THE HARVEST?

The final comment spoke to an ongoing dilemma for sex educators, many of whom also fashioned themselves “multiculturalists”: how could schools in a diverse society teach about sex in a manner that respected different ethnicities, cultures, and religions? The problem would become more acute in the 1980s and especially the 1990s, when millions of immigrants flowed into Europe, the Americas, and the antipodes. It proved particularly difficult in countries that taught sex education “across the curriculum” rather than as a separate course, as New Zealand’s Bernard Moran also noted. “How do parents … make sure that the teachers are playing the game when the sex education is integrated with other subjects?” Moran asked. “The only sure-fire way [is] to have a separate sex and values education programme with a set text, so that parents know exactly what their children are getting—right across the nation—at each age group.” But very few nations did that. In a 1973 survey of seventeen European countries, only two—Finland and Poland—taught sex education as a separate subject; twelve taught it via biology, five in social studies, five in civics, and five as part of religious studies. Even more, countries with otherwise uniform school systems often refrained from standardizing sex education: by 1983, when twelve countries made sex education “mandatory,” only four of them set a national curriculum.49

So it was difficult to know how much sex education children were receiving, if any, and even harder to measure what it did for them. “It is not possible to determine how many sex education programs there are in the schools, or what is being taught in them,” an American scholar frankly acknowledged in 1977. “Most startling of all, no one has the slightest idea what the effects of sex education are or can be.” That same year, a study of Muncie, Indiana—the focus of Helen and Robert Lynd’s 1924 sociological classic, Middletown—confirmed that friends and films had replaced family as the most important source of sexual information in the intervening half century. What had not changed were schools, which were named as the most critical source by only 5 percent of boys (up from 4 percent, in 1924) and 9 percent of girls (up from 5 percent). But that did not stop educators from dreaming, as one did after observing a sex education class in Switzerland in 1969. “I have been witnessing [a] cultural revolution, perhaps the most important of our time,” the observer gushed, praising the Swiss instructor’s frank, unembarrassed account of sexual intercourse and masturbation. “We will only reap the harvest in 20 or 25 years.” A quarter-century later, a new sexual crisis—HIV/AIDS—would indeed bring new expectations for sex education. But it remained unclear what kind of harvest it could reap, and whether it would be bountiful or bitter—and for whom.50