Lessons to be learnt from the history of sex education

Oct 16 2009 by Dr Hera Cook, Birmingham Post

Dr Hera Cook explains what lessons the history of sex education can teach us

Sex education in schools has been a particular focus for controversy for over a century. Whilst there is little evidence about the impact of sexual knowledge on children, the subject arouses great anxiety among parents and teachers.

The first nationwide scandal about sex instruction in schools was in 1914 in Dronfield, a small Derbyshire town. Miss Outram, head teacher, told her class of 11-year-old to 13-year-old girls that babies come from “a little seed in sown in the inside of your mother’s body. God opened a door to you and brought you out into the world.”

Mothers wept with shame at the thought of their daughters’ having such knowledge and fathers removed them from school for months, insisting the teacher had to be replaced.

The school strike seems to have ended only when the Great War began.

This generation did not separate sex from reproduction as we do today - knowledge of pregnancy and birth was corrupting, just as knowledge of sexual intercourse would have been.

By the 1940s, a generation later, there was a degree of consensus; most parents, teachers and the Anglican Church agreed that children needed sex education and it was the responsibility of parents.

But parents were not able to do this; they found it embarrassing, they felt too emotional, they did not know about sex themselves and did not know the proper words for what little they did know. These feelings are similar to those expressed by parents in the latest Ofsted report on Sex and Relationships Education.

So, schools began to take over. Everyone agreed that if sex education was to be taught, it should probably happen before puberty because then the children would not be emotionally involved.

In most schools, the head teachers were worried about corrupting their pupils so many did not teach the subject at all and those that did often gave lectures late in the final term, just before the mass of ‘leavers’ finished school at the age of 14.

Lessons began focusing on evolution and reproduction in fish, birds and animals and the talk about sex concentrated on explaining to children that sex was a reward for the responsibility of having a family and warning them about venereal disease.

This is a similar range of material to that offered in Sex and Relationships Education today. This generation of children did learn a great deal more about sex and reproduction and how their bodies worked than the children of Dronfield had done. Some parents were anxious, despite the caution shown by teachers.

One Birmingham mother complained that teaching children about sex was like breaking the cocoon of a butterfly or opening a rose before its time.

Other adults worried about the high sexual content of films and novels and about what children told each other in the playground. But most parents were happy for teachers to provide sex education.

By the 1960s, those over-educated children had grown up to be parents and were anxious about the knowledge their children had about sex.

One mother told a women’s conference that her daughter of nine years knew more about sex than she did herself. Despite this, most parents still felt embarrassed about the prospect of explaining sex to their children - though the age at which it seemed appropriate to teach the subject had gone down considerably.

Research found that almost half of mothers would still not tell their four-year-old that ‘baby came from mummy’s tummy’ yet the parents in Dronfield considered 13 years of age still too young to be told this kind of information.

In the early 1970s, the first nationwide sex education scandal since Dronfield erupted. Dr Martin Cole, a biologist from Birmingham produced a film that explained hormones and showed a baby being born and a couple having sex.

Critics saw this as promoting sex, not warning young people to stay away until they were married, as sex educators had done from the 1940s to the 1960s. The film reflected the changes taking place in society but it went too far for many parents and schools. There was an explosion in media coverage about the film but it was almost never shown in schools.

The scandal occurred around the time when society began to think that sex and reproduction were separate and there really was no harm in children learning about reproduction.

Today, research shows that adults think it is normal and charming that four-year-old children should know where babies come from and even how they are made. However, some studies still suggest that parents get anxious about their children knowing about sexuality, especially with the increasing access to material on the internet.

The history of sex education suggests that each generation of parents and teachers has worried about the next generation of children learning more than they themselves knew.

Throughout the 20th century, attitudes to sexuality in Britain have relaxed further and further, but there is no evidence that adults felt that their increasing knowledge of sex as children had damaged them.

There have been massive changes in society’s attitude to relationships and sexuality but these changes cannot be attributed to sex education, or the growth in children’s knowledge of sexuality and reproduction.

This article first appeared in the University of Birmingham publication ‘Original’.

Dr Hera Cook is from the College of Arts and Law at the University of Birmingham