Sex education: too little, too late
Sex education must be comprehensive, clear, and compulsory, writes James Turley
Nothing gets up the back of hard-line reactionaries like sex – and, more importantly, under-18s getting anywhere near it without asking their mothers.
One particularly well known point of contention in all this is sex education – who should get it, what they should get and when. “Sex education is an ideological battlefield,” no less, “on which a war is being waged for the hearts and minds of children. Behind the innocuous-sounding words used by the sex education lobby, there is a definite agenda at work to undermine the role of parents and to tear down traditional moral standards. The need for parents to be alert and vigilant has never been greater.” Crikey.
This is the web introduction to a report published by the Family Education Trust, under the title Too much, too soon.1 The title serves as a basic plot summary for this publication, which is a commentary on and polemic against the proposals of schools minister Ed Balls to – among other things – introduce compulsory sex education for primary school children.
This is couched in a general commitment to making personal, social and health education (PSHE) obligatory, putting it “on a statutory footing alongside traditional academic subjects”.2 PSHE (or PSME at some schools, the M standing for ‘moral’) is widely implemented, but currently non-compulsory, and standards vary drastically. This is a fortiori the case for sex education – and why the FET intends to make it a “battlefield”.
The FET report has only just been published, but has propelled Balls’ proposals into the harsh glare of the reactionary media more sharply even than when they were first made in April. The Daily Mail is certainly not happy – “Draft plans suggest children aged five would learn to name parts of the body, while seven-year-olds will learn about physical changes linked to puberty. Nine-year-olds would begin to learn about the facts of life” (July 20). Apparently our correspondent cannot even bring herself to type S-E-X.
The primary concern, both for the Mail and for the FET report, is that parents are going to be cut out of the equation. The FET, for its part, was explicitly set up in 1971 to defend the traditional family from the moral decay of the new, post-60s permissive age. Parents, says the FET’s ‘About us’ FAQ, “are the natural protectors of their children, and, other than in exceptional cases, should always be involved in decisions about their welfare.”3
Of course, parents are in no sense the natural protectors of their children – in both human and social animal communities, it is far from unprecedented for young to be raised in common (what would it mean for a queen bee to ‘protect’ a million worker-drones, anyway?). Instead of giving serious credence to the notion that the very fabric of the natural world somehow demands particular forms of generational succession (the short answer: that only makes sense if the world is the intentional design of a rather whimsical Creator), we should ask: what is this rhetorical obsession with parenthood actually trying to do?
In the case of sex education, it is on one level perfectly clear. Children being given ‘value-free’ (read secular) sex education as a matter of course will allegedly result in more adolescents having sex. This is a bad thing, as it is realistically impossible, given the age structure of political and economic life in this country, for the young lovers to get married and formalise their relationships according to the strictures of the family model. As long as parents have the veto over this, then there is a chance that any given child will not enter what the ultra-right Mail columnist calls the “cycle of abandonment, emotional chaos and harm” that results from “premature” sexual activity. In other words, it is the logic of anti-abortionists supporting incremental reductions in the time limit for terminations, even quoting ‘the science’ around foetal ‘viability’.
Nuclear family
There is another side to this, however, which is the naive extent to which organisations like the FET genuinely identify with the ‘traditional family’. The nuclear family remains, at present, the basic unit of economic life in society – a low-level division of labour that sends a ‘detachment’ (usually the father-patriarch) into the industrial process, and saddles another ‘detachment’ (the mother-wife) with the physical and sexual reproduction required to send people to work every day. A society which finds it useful on one level to treat individuals as completely atomised and on another level is faced with the brute fact of its sociality as such inevitably gives rise to and supports entities like the nuclear family, which lump biological individuals into corporate units.
Another perfectly obvious consequence is that relations within the family unit take on the same form as relations within society as a whole – that is, the family effectively becomes the private property of the father, his wife a chattel slave and his children a promising investment in the future. The former relation has begun to break down, the social contradictions around it being simply too sharp. The women’s movement won the vote, and has achieved major advances since – abortion rights, formal legal equality in employment; a politically active layer of second-class citizens is simply unsustainable.
Yet children are still the property of their parents – and the reality of ‘family values’ is precisely that it is privative, that the natural result is enclosing children in the suffocating grip of their progenitors, who will ‘protect’ them from the ‘harmful’ influences all around them. The logic of leaving ‘moral education’ to parent-owners is precisely that it will be opposed to sex, and to forms of social life that cannot be vetted by parents. Nobody ever took their children out of class because sex-ed was not explicit enough. And for all the Mail’s horror of paedophile sex predators, the fact remains that most child sexual abuse is perpetrated by close family members of the victim. This should not surprise us – incest is a perfectly typical excrescence of this pathological fixation on blood relations.
What of the Balls proposals, then? It is pretty hard to see what the reactionary press is so terrified of, really. Balls insists he wants to keep the parents’ veto in place, and will allow the precise contents of sex-ed lessons to be determined by particular schools (a concession obviously enough targeted at religious schools).
The esteemed minister seems as painfully conscious of offending middle-English sentiments as any New Labourite. If schools can still opt out of teaching the gory details of contraception, then sex education will remain highly uneven and in places painfully inadequate. Once again, New Labour ducks the question of secular education, refusing to challenge the integration of church and state, and the obscene subsidies (in the form of ‘charity’ tax breaks) to faith schools.
In fact, the most direct consequence of these plans coming to fruition (unlikely, given the prospect of a very dramatic recomposition of parliament in under a year) is yet another bureaucratic hoop for schools to jump through, already buckling under the weight of targets, league tables and the ever-looming threat of the Ofsted inspection. From the perspective of parents – at least those who are not in any case ultra-paranoid about sex education – what is at issue is not the appropriation of their rights as parent-owners by society at large, but appropriation by the state bureaucracy. Parents are already ‘bad’ if they feed their children fatty foods, and liable for prosecution if their kids play truant too consistently. Now they are to be ostracised over sex education.
To draw attention to this is not to justify the ‘claim’ of parent-owners to their children, any more than it is to root for truancy or dietary problems. Part of the objective basis for ‘family values’ ideology, as we have seen, is the reality of the family itself. But another part consists in precisely the ‘alternative’ – that every attempt by social democracy to chisel it away takes the form of a bureaucratic imposition, a police action. This drives people into the arms of reactionary demagogues, who promise to defend or restore their patriarchal rights.
Communists are unambiguous – sex education must be comprehensive, clear and every bit as compulsory as the rest of the education system. It is not only the matter of welfare – preventing diseases and unwanted pregnancies – but that of autonomy. Knowledge, as conventional wisdom has it, is power. An adolescent who knows how to wear a condom safely is thereby able to have relaxed and enjoyable sex. By contrast, depriving young people of this knowledge makes them continually reliant on their parents, and thus sexually stunted and neurotic, and all but doomed to continue the logic of patriarchal succession. In a choice between assertive and autonomous teenagers and the emotionally underdeveloped offerings from neurotic reactionary households, the decision is obvious.
Still, sex education cannot be separated from the broader democratic questions in society. This is obvious when we consider the question of non-heterosexual sex education, but applies with equal force to the fight for secularism in education and society at large, and the fight for political power to be transferred from the bourgeoisie to the masses.
Hi,
I felt compelled to place a reply to this whole piece of writing.
I was myself a communist in my youth – for many years. Currently now i am no longer. But my views are the same on this issue. This article saddens me. As a communist, i was enlightened by the belief that a secular society, free from religious intolerance and allowing fully human nature to develop, would result in a better society for us to enjoy. – a positive human nature.
Like it or not, the family is important to an individual. It was very important to me. The idea that we should just inform a child – NOT A RATIONAL ADULT MIND – about sex and choices and then “help yourself” to me is not marxist – it is an expressing of the social decline and decay due to late monopoly capitalism.
I had sex education at school – which this article claims is useless and inadequate currently – yet i waited until i was in a proper relationship before i had sex – when i was in my early 20’s. Now enough embarrasment to me!! But the point i make – i didn’t rush off behind a shed at 15 years old, i didn’t have unprotected sex. I have never had sex with someone i have never cared for – but i admit marriage is an outdated custom – but for me, my self-respect as a secular communist human being told me that engaging in the kind of cheap casual sex often promoted in the media today (mostly the beourgoius media you yourselves label “moral” and “right wing”) was a sad expression of our decadent and socially declining monopoly-capitalist society. And i know that many fellow comrades agreed with me. For this article to claim that lack of sex education increases the liklihood of underage sex is pure nonsense and not supported by facts. If this is so, why is underage sex higher today than it was 60 years ago, when no sex education existed? (and in expectation of an argument; i accept that underage sex has always happened – i am merely talking about frequency).
Sex is a beautiful thing. I agree with you, it is nothing to be ashamed of. But for me, as for Karl Marx (read his lines on man-woman love) sex and love are something very special and cannot be “de-moralised” as this article wishes. Education in sex for children should include what you negatively call “morality”. We should encourage genuine loving relationships first. It is not inherently oppresively capitalist to do so. And that sex can and should – wait. Why not?? These attitudes are not the reserve of religious nutters.
I would want my own child brought up getting the facts of life in a truly human way – love, human morals, self-respect for one’s inner human soul. Not degrading ones humanself to a dog on heat. And not saying “ok, here is the fact – even though you are only a minor in mind, do whatever the hell you want no”. The guidance of a loving parent on sex is important. It was for me, and it is for many others. My parents were also socialist and they believed in a committed relationship before sex – and a strong moral education on it. School sex eduaction must – if it is genuinely socialist – do this. This article saddens me in its promotion of behaviour that is essentially an expression of the social decay resulting for the late monopoly capitalism we currently endure. It applaudes current sub-human attitudes to human family relationships and sex. As a marxist, i must say this. Just read Marx – he writes himself that as capitalism progresses, it applaudes and encourages what is animalistic and sub-human, and tramples on what makes us genuinely human and great.
It would seem that the collapse of the USSR and socialist states such as the GDR in the late 20th century has resulted in a distortion of marxism on the issue of human relationships and sexual behaviour because, in my humble opinion, the rise of middle-class beourgious attitudes and “radical” social mores has corrupted Marxism in its own image. Much of marxism today is a red casing inhabited by radical liberalism, the product of late capitalist society with al its social failings. Gone is the committment to foster and create better individual humans and create a better man and woman with genuine human emotions and morality and a positive constitution. Instead, we now applaud the over-sexualised society late-monopoly capitalism has given us. And now the suggestion – sex must be taught to 5 year old because it is all around us.
WHO SURROUNDS US WITH IT IN MEDIA? WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? WHY IS THIS ALL ON THE RISE ON A SCALE NEVER SEEN BEFORE? Thats what a genuine marxist should be asking.
Sex education at a younger age will not change things. Mark these lines – it will not change these negative social phenomena. They are the result of broader trends and currents within society resulting from the bankrupt capitalist society we live in.
There is a better and more radical way to lower underage pregnancies, STD’s and such; change our oversexualised capitalist media (because sex does sell – i fail to see the “sexually reactionary capitalist media” this article screams so loud about – and it uses it constantly, from cars to deodrant) and make it more balanced and human. Sex is special, between 2 loving and committed adults. Change our society into a secular socialist world that applauds and educates children on what makes us human – deep emotional love for one man and one woman partner, morality towards ourselves and people of the opposite gender by respecting sex between us as powefully moral and emotional, and self-respect to enjoy the beauty of sex in a committed relationship free from shame and such. Seeing sex as something not to be toyed with or treated as a mere commodity to be desensitised from our emotional frame. Now, such a programme would be genuinely radical.
The mechanics of sex is not enough – the human aspect, what is negatively called “morality” must be present in such an education. Without it, i forsee more STD;s amd unwanted pregnancies – a sad reflection the decline of mankind under late monopoly capitalism.
Something marxists everywhere should be striving to consign to the dustbin of history.
Casual sex is such a sad reflection on an individual and their worth. It is animalistic, not human. Capitalist media and society is very happy to accomodate it. I say; aim to be a fully developed and rounded human being; aim to be a genuine communist.
Has marxism changed so much in 30 or 40 years? Because this is what i was taught. Seriously.
(ps. i do support abortion and gay rights…. please don’t be tempted to lump me in that crowd – i have noticed this articles desire to lump all counter-argument as one big reactionary conspiracy undeserving of respect or acknowledgement).
Thank you.
“Casual sex is such a sad reflection on an individual and their worth. It is animalistic, not human.”
So practicing casual sex makes you a worthless animal? Do you really think it is the role of communists to decide what is human, what is of worth in a man? I was under the impression that communism aimed to bring about a state of affairs where man is free and decides what is of worth in himself and is the master of himself, not subject to an artificial concept of what is correct and civilized. If monogomy and ‘deep emotional love for one man and one woman partner’ is that (rigid)choice then so be it, but it is not for us to dictate what will procede naturally from a free and equal society.
James:
No, ideas of sex and love waiting are not the preserve of ‘religious nutters’. But they are a *product* of a basically religious world-view, even when they are expressed in an atheistic way. Underlying such views is the notion that a moral calculus can be deduced from the basic nature of the human organism, which at the end of the day is a variant of Aristotle’s ‘final cause’.
My view is that, if one can speak of human nature at all, it is that nature which *does not have* a ‘final cause’ – indeed, it is that relationship to nature that renders all ‘final causes’ irrelevant through our appropriation and transformation of nature’s capacities through labour.
As far as sex goes – adolescents are *physically* capable of sex due to the lifecycle of the human organism. Whether or not they are emotionally capable of it is a socially determined matter. If the idea of plucking a random twelve year old out of a classroom, handing him or her a packet of durex and saying ‘go nuts!’ strikes us as insane, it is because today’s adolescents are the product of a society which is intensely neurotic about pubescent sexuality. If we were more honest about things, then we would be able to make ourselves useful to adolescents, and offer practical guidance without moral judgement.
In any case, hormones very often win out against morals. I would rather everyone, from the onset of puberty, knew how to use a condom so as and when they do have sex they can be shielded from the most serious potential consequences than the current situation, where it is alarmingly still the case that many people think that a crisp packet (cheese and onion flavour only, folks!) will do just as well.
It’s all very well talking about creating a better man and woman. But we are all products of this fallen world – prescribing to Socialist (Wo)Man *in advance* the proper sexual mores turns it into a technocratic exercise with no respect for the dignity and autonomy of real, living people. Our job is to create the social conditions whereby people will flourish on their own terms; meet their own methods of sexual fulfilment.
As for the ‘reactionary capitalist media’ – pick up a copy of the Daily Mail one of these days! I agree that the proliferation of sexualised media *outside* of this particular sector is a serious factor – I put it to you that it is the *combination* of cheap sexualisation and puritanical moralism that does the most harm. Taking one side rather than the other is not the answer.