Sex Education

Sex Education. Before the twentieth century, sex education took the form primarily of personal observation and informal talks, but a handful of books such as Aristotle's Masterpiece (first published in English around 1684) and the Reverend John Todd's moralistic Student's Manual (1837) also conveyed rudimentary information about sexual functions. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union called for students to take a vague pledge of premarital sexual abstinence as part of its White Cross Movement for personal purity. Countless religious writers and moralists issued veiled but dire warnings against prostitution, masturbation, and all forms of sexual activity outside the bonds of matrimony.

The modern movement to place sex education in the public schools grew out of a broader Progressive Era crusade against prostitution and venereal diseases that came to be known as the social‐hygiene movement. Social Diseases and Marriage (1904) by Dr. Prince A. Morrow (1846–1913), a New York dermatologist, became the central document for the American Social Hygiene Association, a union of public‐health physicians, educators, and antiprostitution activists funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. From its founding in 1914 to its decline and withdrawal from the field in the early 1960s, this organization led the fight for sex education. Prompted as much by fears of moral breakdown as by medical concern, Morrow and others insisted that almost all venereal diseases were transmitted through prostitution and that the social‐hygiene movement must therefore attack both problems simultaneously. Despite what they perceived as a “conspiracy of silence” surrounding sexual matters, social hygienists argued that sex education was essential to dispel the ignorance about sex, disease, and immorality that made prostitution and other misbehavior possible. After experimenting with public lectures to adult audiences, sex educators by 1914 turned decisively toward the public schools to teach young people a mixture of medical and moral lessons about anatomy; proper thoughts; and Protestant, middle‐class morality.

Sex education in universities and public schools expanded significantly during World War I with funding from the Chamberlain‐Kahn Act (1918), so that by 1920 at least 25 percent of public high schools offered some form of sex education through biology and social‐studies classes, poster exhibits, or lectures by physicians. Despite attempts by sex educators to ally with the progressive‐education and mental‐hygiene movements, sex education drew most of its funding and energy from public‐health officials in individual cities and states. Although most sex educators took a generally sober and conservative approach, opponents in the late 1960s publicly attacked the allegedly radical programs favored by the U.S. Sex Information Education Council and its leader Mary Steichen Calderone. Sex education was subsequently marked by public acrimony, even as the AIDS crisis and concerns over teenage pregnancy prompted more schools to institute some form of instruction.

Central questions dating from the earliest days of the sex‐education movement persisted nearly a century later: Is sex education's mission primarily moral or medical? Is sex education the school's or the parents’ responsibility? Does knowledge of sexual facts lead young people to experiment sexually? Conversely, is sexual information by itself sufficient to alter sexual behavior at all?
See also Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome; Prostitution and Antiprostitution; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform.

Bibliography

James T. Sears, ed., Sexuality and the Curriculum: The Politics and Practices of Sexuality Education, 1992.
Jeffrey P. Moran , Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the Twentieth Century, 2000.

Jeffrey P. Moran