Sex Education: The Basic Issues

Introduction

William A. Marra, Ph.D.

An observable and even predictable sequence now occurs in most places where sex education courses are introduced into the local school curriculum. The sequence has three steps. With this book we hope to contribute a counter-argument.

First of all, sex education courses are introduced with as little fanfare as possible. The pupils might bring home a notice informing parents that the school is about to initiate a program in family living. Most parents will take the notice in stride, if indeed they even read it. They have an implicit confidence that the professional educators know what they are doing and certainly would never introduce anything really offensive into the program of studies.

The second step is taken when the small child comes home from school one day and cheerfully tells his mother, “I know how babies are made,” or something similar. A variation of this step would be that the parent somehow gets to see the curriculum on sex education – whether proposed or actually implemented. There in black and white, will be page after page of sexological details, references, suggested behavior, and so on. The parent, whether father or mother, will blush and stare in disbelief.

Most parents will then experience indignation mixed with the sickening revulsion that enters an adult’s consciousness when he hears that young children have been in the presence of some sexual pervert who has indecently exposed himself. For the typical sex education program (for instance, the program adopted in the Rochester Diocese, or the one outlined in the Guidelines issued by the New Jersey State Board of Education) impresses most adults as just this: indecent exposure, through words and visual means, to young children of actions and anatomical details which they as mere children were never meant to hear about or see.

But now, step three: the proponents and creators of such sex education programs enter the scene, their facial expressions a mixture of hurt professional competence, still zealous scientific concern, and mild rebuke over having their credentials or good faith challenged. With quite learned terminology and quite conscious frankness, they professionally scold the parents for having been remiss in teaching the children all about sex. On second thought, however, they make the parents realize that, even if the latter really wanted to teach their children (and even when they are not too embarrassed to teach), alas, they are most probably not trained to do an adequate job.

So the burden of doing just this adequate job necessarily falls on these selfless professionals. It so happens that they combine scientific expertise in human sexuality with that marvelous attitude, so rare among parents and, in fact, among all who lack special training; namely, the complete absence of all embarrassment over any and every aspect of things sexual. To use their favorite, friendly slang: they have no hang-ups over sex. And thus they are especially valuable in transmitting to the young the truly healthy attitudes towards sex.

All of this is already awesome to the typical nonprofessional parent. It becomes even more so when a list of prestigious institutions and associations is produced, all of them stoutly for sex education programs in the school. Still more awesome, if possible, is the litany of prominent clergymen of all faiths who testify to the great value and urgent need of the sex program.

But the clinching argument in this step three is the rhetorical question hurled at every blushing parent, every parent who somehow feels the absolute need to protect his young children from penis and vagina talk (and diagrams); the question, namely: “What’s the matter? Do you think sex is something dirty?”

With this question, most parents are effectively intimidated and finally silenced. Doubts about the healthiness of their own attitudes to sex are aroused. Why, indeed, are they so concerned to shield a child from open and frank (and scientific!) discussion of a perfectly normal, basic, and universal natural process? Certainly, they would not object at all if the schools taught courses on teeth-hygiene and accompanied the verbal instruction with all sorts of diagrams and slides about tooth enamel, decay, infection, and so on.

But why, then, do they object when another, equally natural phenomenon is discussed? Why should words like cervix, clitoris, erection, orgasm, and ejaculation be considered unfit for children when the dental words were perfectly acceptable? The dread thought must then occur to many parents (and perhaps to many educators, too, who now are so intensely promoting sex education programs?) that, indeed, they have been afflicted with this narrow, prudish, even Jansenistic error – that sex is dirty and the less said about it the better. Thus far step three.

As far back as 1927, Dietrich von Hildebrand, in his classic work In Defense of Purity, took up and answered this rhetorical question which suggested that the only reason a man wants to hide something is because it is ugly or dirty. In the essay which now follows, Dr. von Hildebrand pursues the link between noble shame, or bashfulness, and intimacy, especially in sexual matters. He shows how this intimacy is killed by the classroom publicity which inevitably and essentially attends all such instructions. He also shows that the sex education courses, for all their saturation content, radically misunderstand sex because they misunderstand the God-destined role of sex to be in the service of wedded love.

My own essay then follows. It pretends to be no more than a mere popular paraphrase of von Hildebrand’s profound thought, in an idiom and style perhaps more accessible to a wider audience. It also includes certain practical discussions and the answers to a few objections which are everywhere voiced by many who believe von Hildebrand’s total rejection of all sex education courses in the schools to be too extreme.

In the Appendix, page 23, there appears an evaluation, written by Dr. Rhoda Lorand, of the sex instruction outline of the Diocese of Rochester. The Rochester Diocese program is important because many Catholic educationists have hailed it as the model of the type of program which Catholic schools should follow.

May this book confirm those numerous adults who are convinced that there is something radically wrong with sex education, even if they can offer no articulate defense of their convictions.

William A. Marra, Ph.D., 1969