Sex Education: The Basic Issues II

“Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”

Romans 1:22

Dr. William A. Marra

Basing myself upon von Hildebrand, and in some respects amplifying his thought, I propose here to develop four specific charges against the sex education programs now in force or about to be implemented, namely, that these programs are first, useless; second, distorting; third, psychologically harmful; and fourth, morally dangerous.

1. The Courses Are Useless

Proponents of sex education programs are aware that they must somehow show a need, even an urgent need, for the proposed programs. Otherwise how to justify the vast sums of money and the additional teaching hours that are requested?

They attempt to show this need in one of two ways, either they point to the sex-charged atmosphere that surrounds today’s youth, or they call attention to the depressing statistics which indicate all sorts of worsening behavior in any matter connected with human sexuality, e.g., rates of divorce, venereal disease, homosexuality, unwed pregnancies, and so on.

After they develop the specifics of the sex-charged atmosphere and after they recite the depressing statistics, the proponents of sex education in the schools insist that ignorance and misinformation are the root causes of modern troubles about sex; or, at the very least, they suggest that information and imparting of a healthy attitude towards sex can do much both to protect youth from the sexual pollution of our culture and to reverse the deteriorating trends reported by the statistics.

Just because many adults are indeed concerned with helping the youth of today to survive, morally and emotionally, in a world hostile to innocence, they become at once sympathetic to the sex educators. For the latter seem not only to share their concern, but also to be able and willing to act, positively and forthrightly, to help the beleaguered youth.

Now the simple truth is that our modern citizens, the adults as well as the youth, suffer from a lack of formation and not from a lack of information. Does anyone seriously believe that marriages break up because the partners are ignorant of human sexuality? That, for example, they don’t know how to achieve orgasm? And if we notice a wayward, sexually promiscuous girl of fifteen, can we assign the cause of her trouble to ignorance – about, say, the function of the clitoris or the location of the fallopian tubes?

There are, to be sure, several kinds of sexual statistics which conceivably might be altered up or down by more intense education. We refer to the rate of venereal disease and of unwed mothers. That a youth contracts a venereal disease may, indeed, be based on his ignorance of the way such a disease spreads. What is more, ignorance may cause him to neglect the symptoms of the disease and to fail to seek medical help. Again, that a young, unwed girl finds herself pregnant may be due to her ignorance of efficient contraceptive devices.

Now, if the proponents of sex education courses mean simply to protect youth from these two troubles, let them say so. Let them admit, with the very frankness they extol, that medical ignorance greatly contributes to the soaring rate of venereal disease and teenage pregnancy. And let them claim that information can reverse or at least arrest these rates.

But they never clearly make such claims. Nor, if they do make them, can they present any evidence that the claims are true. For even in these two problems, where ignorance may plausibly be named as the cause and information may confidently be proclaimed as the cure, the experimental results are anything but hopeful. The official health figures from Sweden are very instructive. In a country which has had sex education courses for twenty years (and mandatory courses for the past ten years) all the statistics show continued worsening sexual behavior, with one exception, there are fewer prostitutes – for obvious reasons!

Still less is there any evidence whatsoever that sex education in human sexuality can promote the really healthy attitudes toward sex which the proponents allegedly seek to develop in the young.

Thus is our first charge justified, Given the problems of unchastity, unhappy marriages, sexual perversions, and the like – which are real enough and pressing – the alleged solution of the sex educators is useless. Not information, but formation, is needed. Not accustoming youth to all the details of sex so as to inoculate them from the sexual pollutants, themselves, is what the adult generation must attempt if it is to avoid betraying the youth of our day. Rather must it make strenuous efforts to suppress the pollutants.

2. The Courses Are Distorting

There is an amazing similarity in the programs of sex education being proposed for the various school systems in the country, whether public or parochial. Of course, we are assured by such national advisory groups as SIECUS that each local community is encouraged to develop its own special program consistent with the local needs and desires of the community. Nevertheless, the programs are so similar, not to say so uniform, that one marvels at the fact. Not even a monolithic religion or political party could hope to achieve the kind of unanimity already to be found in the nationwide sex education programs.

There is, however, one point of difference in the various programs – their names. Some are called simply Sex Education programs. Others are given more honorific titles, such as Family Living, On Becoming a Person and the like. Whatever the name, two grand parts are invariably to be found in each program. The first is quaintly referred to as instruction in plumbing, i.e., the anatomical and physiological details of the male and female bodies, as well as the biological details of coitus, conception, pregnancy, and so on. The second part concerns attitudes.

Both parts are distressingly objectionable. The plumbing curriculum is so thorough, so all-embracing, so minutely detailed in films, texts and diagrams that one disbelieves it is meant to help a student become a person. It would be far more accurate to entitle the curriculum, On Becoming a Gynecologist, Urologist, and Obstetrician. If the school officials of this nation spent the same time, energy, and ingenuity to teach reading as they seem willing to spend to teach sex education, we should become a nation of Rhodes scholars.

So far as our charge of distortion goes, however, our chief quarrel here must be with the second part of this kind of curriculum, the development of healthy attitudes. These are but code words which really mean that sex must be looked upon in an amoral way, must be seen as something good and clean and beautiful – and strictly up to the individual person’s discretion. A healthy attitude towards masturbation or fornication, therefore, means that we do not allow a priori notions of guilt and sin to rule out such behavior with no further ado.

On the contrary, the code words insist that we must see what is really involved in, say, masturbation; and this turns out to be but the periodic satisfaction of certain drives. And we must notice, to dispel the grave misinformation so prevalent among youth, that there is no scientific or medical evidence at all that such behavior is harmful to either the body or the psyche.

Sometimes, of course, in deference to traditional morality, the youth are told that some churches think that such behavior is not morally allowed. The youth are then advised to consult their pastor or clergyman if they have any specific questions on the matter.

The results are quite predictable. After hours of learned scientific instruction, with films, lectures, and diagrams, the youth are properly impressed by the truth of what has been so thoroughly presented. Then the clergy and the church are mentioned – as an afterthought. The weak point is then made that the local clergyman, with his timid insistence on some moral code, might somehow add his charge of morally evil to a practice already stamped normal and healthy by all the relevant sciences.

Even this unequal contest would still be better than nothing, however, if the typical clergyman did at least insist – timid voice and all – that there is a moral veto to some practices which may be medically neutral. In truth, of course, clerical opposition to sins of impurity becomes daily more muted. Worse still, a number of articulate clergymen have even raised thin voices on the opposite side. With sophistic references to the new morality and to new psychological insights, they now proclaim that no practice is necessarily evil in itself – especially if it is intended to serve love.

Still much worse than this frontal attack on old morality is the far more subtle and oblique tactic whereby the entire moral question with respect to sex is tacitly avoided. In its stead, under the guise of reporting what youth are now thinking, the principle is defended and promulgated that each generation has its own values and its own attitudes towards all sorts of behavior, and that this present younger generation also feels it has the right to its own values.

Not just sexual morality, but all morality, is thus tacitly identified with subjective, individual whim so long as this latter is somehow grasped as modern and fashionable, as relevant to the contemporary scene. When the plumbing part of sex education, with all its pretentious scientific expertise, is joined to this thoroughly amoral general approach to all behavior, the nature of sex is radically distorted. The youth will no longer be able to see at all what at best he might have grasped only dimly, that he must live out his life in the sight of God; that he is a creature subject to eternally valid moral commandments; and, in the matter of sex, he must possess his body with reverence.

Once, after I had insisted that youth needs formation, and not information, and that at least the Church-related schools should attempt to promulgate the religious and moral attitudes indispensable for purity, a priest objected, saying that, “The only way anyone can make a mature ethical judgment is on the basis o information.” He thus defended the twelve-year plumbing curriculum as necessary for allowing the children to judge (and therefore act) morally. As specious as it is, this argument no doubt convinces many persons. To grasp its utter falsity, however, we have only to notice its ridiculous implications. If, as the priest claims, twelve years of the most detailed anatomical and physiological instruction are needed for young people to decide whether or not it would be morally permissible to fornicate, to masturbate, or to soul-kiss, then, by the same token, if a person wants to judge rightly about, let us say, the virtue of honesty, he must have twelve years of instruction in embezzlement, safe-cracking, burglary, and so on. Who can endure such folly?

Meanwhile, notwithstanding such insincere attempts to justify raw sex instruction by appealing to morality, the amoral revolution gains momentum. Just when schools and churches should be fighting to restore the sense of authentic morality, we find instead that they now mean to display one of the most difficult areas of morality, sex, in an atmosphere at once shameless and thoroughly amoral.

3. The Programs Are Psychologically Harmful

We have already mentioned that most adults spontaneously judge the sex education courses to be guilty of indecent exposure to young children. And it is a simple fact that most parents spontaneously try to shield their children from exposure to naked sex.

Von Hildebrand has already explained why this is so. Each person’s own sexuality represents, as it were, his secret, his intimum. A veil of bashfulness thus surrounds it. Anything from the outside which publicly points even to sexuality in general comes very close to piercing this veil. And when the outside thing, thanks to the special circumstances, really does point specifically to an individual person’s sexuality, the veil is indeed pierced, and perhaps destroyed. There is a moral outrage here, and also the inflicting of grave psychological damage.

This power to offend bashfulness and pierce the veil of modesty is to be found in all cases of indecent exposure of one’s naked body to an innocent person, in dirty jokes told especially to make innocence blush, and in the tasteless public sex instruction where the combination of descriptions, diagrams, and analyses of behavior is enough to violate the spirit of any child and to induce fits of hurt weeping.

The intimate quality of sex demands that all references to it be of the utmost delicacy and reverence. And this same quality absolutely demands, as von Hildebrand has said, a strictly duo-personal relation whenever information is imparted. Otherwise, the public discussion of vagina, penis, coitus, and so on (not to mention all the perversions) will rudely cause each child to grasp that his own intimate world has somehow been pushed into the public gaze and that others are staring at him. He may, of course, try to overcome his hurt feelings, his great spiritual discomfort, by either strict silence or else by coarse words that are part of his self-created bluff. But the objective fact is that he has been rudely, cruelly violated in a spiritual sense; he has been spiritually molested.

But publicity is not the only enemy of intimacy. There is also the question of premature information and, moreover, too detailed information. Sex education courses in the schools are guilty of both additional charges so self-evidently and obviously that we need not delay on them here.

All of these violations of intimacy are so serious that sex education in classrooms and to mixed groups of varying emotional ages, would be an abomination even if it were taught by perfectly tactful and absolutely pure teachers, and even if the content were not nearly so detailed as it is now. When we add the realistic facts about the inevitable imperfections of the teachers (e.g., in purity and tact), when we add the saturated twelve years of instruction with no detail omitted . . . then we are sure that any sex education program in the schools is certain to be an outrage and a disaster of the first order.

Parents are therefore duty-bound to resist such an outrage. They must understand that they have the right to impart to their children both the necessary information about the origin of human life, and the far more important correct attitudes about sex. They have the duty and responsibility to do all this, that they alone have the opportunity to do it – with tact, delicacy, discretion and with loving motivation.

That some parents, perhaps a majority, fail to impart even a minimum of factual instruction is indeed regrettable. Nevertheless, the resulting ignorance in the child, the misinformation, or even the fact that he learns about sex in the gutter – as deplorable as all of this may be – is not nearly so harmful as the public disclosure in the classroom would be.

Let us pause on this point. Given an otherwise good home life, wherein modesty and reverence are encouraged, given the good example of the harmonious lives of the parents, what child is really so harmed by the lack of factual information about sex? Is his chance of a happy marriage compromised by this lack? Will he be more, rather than less, likely to engage in sins of impurity? Will the girl be less feminine and the boy less masculine because neither knows the details of the other’s anatomy and has only a vague knowledge of his or her own? We have only to ask these questions to realize what was stressed in our first charge, that the alleged urgent need for sex education – twelve years of it! – is illusory.

One more point. Many a mother consciously intends to withhold sex information from her child. She is not a prude, nor is she inhibited by any exaggerated sense of shame. But she is convinced that the child should see and know just so much and nothing further at a given age. Who is anyone to contradict her? By what right does another person, whether educator or government official, seek to overrule the mother’s wishes in this matter? It may be that the mother wishes her child to have no knowledge at all of sex, even at an age when the child might need it. Still, this is her responsibility.

Only if it could be shown that her failure to teach her child gravely affected either the good of the child himself, or else the common good, would it be at all intelligible why another should be allowed to overrule the mother’s wishes. But such consequences can never be shown with respect to ignorance of sexual information. We must conclude, therefore, that an unfortunate attitude is operative in those educators and government officials who rudely push aside parental objection as they hasten to give children what they really need.

If parents suffer their God-given responsibilities and prerogatives to be overruled in this most sensitive area of sex information, they may expect future overruling in other areas. Educators and officials may not agree with any given parent’s strictures on diet or clothes or recreation – or reading matter, or anything whatever. And with the same arrogant rudeness, they may be expected to give the children in question what is really good for them.

4. The Programs Are Morally Dangerous

Our final charge is that these sex education programs, far from arresting the deteriorating trends in sexual morality, will accelerate them.

One need not be an expert in sexuality or in morality. One need not be a parent. It suffices that one is a mature adult to see that sin is at all times attractive (and easy to acquiesce in), whereas the morally good course is often enough unattractive and most often difficult.

The major Western religions have indeed taught that human nature has been wounded as a result of some original sin. As a consequence, men of all ages incline towards morally objectionable things, towards bribes, flattery, cheating – and impurity.

Any mature person is fully conscious of this not just this downward pull of moral evil but also the attractively seductive things connected with human sex. The very success of pornographic films and books, the omnipresence of sex in the advertising fields, should convince any mature person that sex is something extraordinary and that, as a result, its abuse can exercise a powerful fascination on the human race.

Nor can a man argue that sex is so attractive only because people are curious and that, when once we drop our Victorian prudish attitudes towards it, it will excite no greater attention than matters of diet. The truth is that curiosity accounts for but very little of the obsessive interest in sex, especially obscene and pornographic instances of it. Who indeed frequents the pornographic movies and other public displays of erotica? Who reads the dirty books and newspapers? Is it the innocent mind of someone curious to know some anatomical detail? Or is it not rather the leering mind of someone with more than enough experience and knowledge?

It is alleged that sex in reality is just an ordinary human experience, on the same biological level as the processes of eating and digesting. C. S. Lewis says wittily, “Perhaps sex is just an ordinary process like eating and digesting. Nevertheless, we never notice that men will queue up around the block to pay five dollars just to see an undressed lamb chop.”

If we are agreed, therefore, that our fallen nature renders us extremely sensitive to the lure of impure sex, and if we are further agreed that all lingering on sexual matters may constitute a temptation and an occasion of sin for us, even though they be presented in a pure way, then we must denounce as satanically vicious a program that means to saturate children and youth with twelve years of sex.

Have the clergy and other educators defending these programs gone mad? Do they not remember how, especially in their adolescence, the slightest allusion to sex was enough to set in motion persistent temptations to impurity? Why now do they wish to inflict these cruel gratuitous temptations upon youth already too sorely tempted? Why, to make matters worse, do they link these tasteless graphic instructions in anatomy with the subtle poison of a situation ethics that flatters the individual even as it dethrones or ignores any absolute moral commandment?

It would seem that such programs are calculated to demoralize the youth. They combine increased exposure to temptations with decreased emphasis on moral absolutes. Only a saint from birth (or, at the opposite end, a eunuch) could survive such education without harm to his purity, chastity and modesty.

We must insist that even pure course materials may be grave occasions of sin for youth. Such is the power of human sex that even a verbal reference to a woman’s body might excite a youth to impure thoughts. Infinitely worse, however, are many of the materials actually in use or proposed in sex education courses. The drawings and diagrams are frequently on the same level as latrine art. And the verbal description of intercourse or, of perversions, are worthy of any smut magazine.

Not only may such materials excite impure thoughts, which in turn will result in impure action; they will also cause otherwise innocent children – not yet developed enough to be sexually aroused or to be fascinated with impurity – to experiment. This will especially be the case with the younger children, who in the fifth or sixth grade learn all about masturbation and about the mechanics of sexual intercourse.

Dr. Rhoda Lorand, a recognized authority on child psychology and the author of the book, Love, Sex and the Teenager (which received nationwide endorsement from various institutes) has made the following comments on the ill-conceived Rochester Diocese plan:

As for the course material in the upper grades, no one with even minimal understanding of children would recommend that sixth-graders should be preoccupied with miscarriage and abortion, or even the details of normal childbirth; or that the fifth grade is the appropriate one in which to discuss `the marriage act’ and childbirth. Sexual excitement, confusion, anxiety, and fear of adulthood will inevitably result in many cases. Seventh graders will become erotically impatient to go out on dates as a result of classroom discussions of adolescent kissing and embracing. What good can come of it? And why the rush to discuss illegitimacy, homosexuality, venereal disease, and prostitution with eight-graders (average age, thirteen)? Such discussions carry an unintended message to the children, namely, `We expect that you are about to be involved in such experiences.’ All of this misguided `instruction’ is deeply disturbing to the youngsters, even if they manage to keep a poker face to retain the good opinion of their teachers.

Postscript on Purity

Although most people can spontaneously and directly distinguish between a sexual activity or discussion which is pure and another which is impure, the line between purity and impurity is not so easily drawn in abstract theoretical or legal terms. As a consequence, mature persons are often at a loss to put into words just why they find, for example, indecent exposure impure. Why then is the seemingly identical action permitted in marriage and there quite compatible with purity.

The question is bound to arise, therefore, as to just why marriage has the apparently magical power to change impure things into pure ones. In all his works on sex and human love, but especially in the already mentioned In Defense of Purity, von Hildebrand has explored in depth this very question. His analysis, besides answering the question, can provide a genuine case for chastity which is profound enough and adequate enough to convince youth that the virtue of purity is a glorious jewel, well worth the effort to acquire and hold.

Von Hildebrand insists that human sex can never be understood from below, as if it were some instinct driving the race to propagate itself. On the contrary, sex must be understood as the God-destined servant of wedded love. The love of a man for a woman, and a woman for a man, is a mighty thing, swelling up within the spirit. It is deep and earnest and it rejoices in the very thought of the beloved. Above all, such love ardently desires union with the loved one. When love is mutual, the single wish of the lovers is to share each other’s fate, to be joined in a permanent union.

Now, the essence of marriage is the uttered promise of each person to share just that common life and common fate. The vows are freely placed acts of the will which mean to set the love union beyond any possible future caprice or arbitrariness. Once the mutual consent is given, the spouses are invited, as it were, to enter the hitherto closed garden of sex. They are invited to become, in the words of the Lord, two in one flesh. In and with sex, they accomplish an intrinsic and irrevocable act of self-donation.

For anyone who has ever loved, even for anyone who, although he never yet has loved, has nonetheless the ability to grasp the meaning of love, the full meaning and value of sex becomes evident only against this background of wedded love. Sex is then clearly grasped as having been destined by God, thanks to its very quality of intimacy and tenderness, as the bodily expression and completion of this love. Moreover, as von Hildebrand notes, to the mystery of union (whereby two persons accomplish a mutual self-donation) has been added the mystery of procreation.

It is no chance that God has invested that act with this creative significance. As God’s love is the creative principle in the universe, so love is everywhere creation; and there is a profound significance in the nexus – at once symbol and reality – whereby from the creative act – in which two become one flesh from love and in love – the new human being proceeds. (In Defense of Purity, p. 26)

Impurity means, simply, any sexual activity isolated from wedded love. What in the intimacy and earnestness of married love is chaste and pure becomes defiling and degrading outside of marriage. Instead of tender and irrevocable self-donation, there is a squandering of self and a desecration of the act intended by God to serve love in its two-fold mystery.

Before marriage, the pure person understands that sex is a closed garden. He refrains from dwelling on this sphere lest he be attracted by the seductive allure of isolated sex. He understands, also, that each person’s sexuality is an intimum, to be bared only to the beloved spouse. He looks with horror, therefore, upon all behavior and even all speech which coarsely violates this intimum.

The French formulation of the Ninth Commandment, in what must at first seem to be a terse and merely negative injunction, declares, “Thou shalt not seek the work of the flesh outside marriage.”

When understood in terms of von Hildebrand’s analysis of sex, love, and marriage, however, this formulation is grasped as exactly expressing God’s will for men, that they be pure, that in action and even in thought, they possess their bodily vessel in awe before the mystery of sex in its unitive and procreative powers.

Appendix

The Rochester Sex Instruction Program

The following evaluation of the Rochester Diocese program outline for Sex Education and Family Life was made by Dr. Rhoda Lorand. She is a Psychologist and Adjunct Associate Professor at Long Island University’s Graduate School of Education, a practitioner of child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy for twenty years. Dr. Lorand is the author of the widely acclaimed book, Love, Sex and the Teenager. The Rochester Diocese program is significant in that many so-called Catholic educators have hailed it as a model of the type of program which Catholic schools should follow.

The Rochester Diocese program is fundamentally the same as many others sent to me by parents in different sections of the country in that it contains the dangerous errors which characterize the current sex education programs.

It seems fairly obvious that the physicians and nurses who help prepare the blueprints, as it were, for these programs are guided, consciously or unconsciously, by their knowledge of medical school courses. Such material is fine for individuals old enough to pursue nursing and medical studies, but it is as inappropriate for little children’s minds and emotions as goose liver and champagne are for their stomachs.

Basically all these programs are alike in their manifest ignorance of the psycho-sexual stages of development, the emotional needs of the child, and the role of the unconscious in the learning process. This program, like the others, will destroy the peace of the latency period in forcing sexual preoccupations upon the children at a time when they would normally sublimate sexual curiosity and sexual drive into mastery of academic learning.

The material is grossly inappropriate at every level and shows the pervasive effect of the atmosphere created by SIECUS, i.e., nothing is too much or too soon and we must tell the children everything we know about sexuality as soon as possible – as though some great benefit would result from such crash programs. They seem to be designed to achieve the impossible goals of instant knowledge, instant understanding, and instant maturity. These programs are born of total ignorance of the fact that a little child’s mind is not a small edition of an adult’s mind, and that the degree to which a child appears to be able to think like an adult represents only a fraction of his learning processes.

If this material were presented to the children by a saint, it would still over stimulate them and arouse anxiety, leading eventually to greater acting-out of sexual drives. Moreover, the usurping of this parental function weakens the parent-child relationship. All efforts should be directed towards helping parents function more adequately, so that they can more readily answer the occasional sexual query the latency child will ask during a temporary breakthrough of sexual curiosity. Even more important, voluntary parent discussion groups should begin with parents of nursery-age children, when childhood sexual curiosity is at a peak. In such groups, if led by a knowledgeable person, parents would learn not only how to deal with questions verbally, but could become aware of the unverbalized experiences which become the almost immutable core of sexual knowledge and attitudes. When the parent of the young child is the sex educator, a much greater closeness develops between them. The situation changes in adolescence, when the young individual, striving for independence from his parents, generally prefers to receive sexual information in privacy from an adult other than his parents. The adolescent needs the privacy which belongs to sexuality in a healthy civilized society.

As for the course material in the upper grades, no one with even minimal understanding of children would recommend that sixth-graders should be preoccupied with miscarriage and abortion or even the details of normal childbirth – or that the fifth grade is the appropriate one in which to discuss “the marriage act” and childbirth. Sexual excitement, confusion, anxiety, and fear of adulthood will inevitably result in many cases. Seventh-graders will become erotically impatient to go out on dates as a result of classroom discussions of adolescent kissing and embracing. What good can come of it? And why the rush to discuss illegitimacy, homosexuality, venereal disease, and prostitution with eighth-graders (average age: 13)? Such discussions carry an unintended message to children, namely, “We expect that you are about to be involved in such experiences.” All of this misguided instruction is deeply disturbing to the youngsters, even if they manage to keep a poker face to retain the good opinion of their teachers.

Child analysts are beginning to get firsthand contact with results of these programs. Beneath the verbal facility they are finding anxiety, guilt, and confusion. The knowledge is turning out to be pseudo-knowledge, which has in no way been helpful.

Religiously educated children suffer incomparably more than others because of the irreverent nature of the thoughts and fantasies aroused in them by this type of instruction. A host of erotic and unseemly fantasies about their teachers, ministers, and family members will be evoked no matter how calmly the material is presented. Sexual drives are stimulated in school, and the truly religious youngsters will have to make superhuman efforts to suppress such disturbing fantasies. It is painful to think of the torment to which these children will be so helplessly subjected, and of their ultimate and inevitable need for intensive therapy in order to undo the corroding and distorting effects of guilt, anxiety, loss of self-esteem, and feelings of alienation from the family.

Dr. Rhoda Lorand