Fifty years of Sex Education: Where are we and how did we get here?
by Gill Robins, Christian Concern:
Wind the school clock back fifty years to 27 July 1967. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 gains Royal Assent and homosexual practice is no longer illegal. Based on the current zeitgeist, you might expect that schools would be encouraged to hold Pride parties, to make posters or wear badges celebrating this new step in sexual liberty, and to teach a few lessons about overcoming social prejudice and the length of the journey still to be travelled to genuine equality.
Actually, what happened in schools was absolutely nothing. Even though the Sixties were in full swing, sex education looked very different then – it was virtually non-existent. No school would have seen a need to celebrate, or even discuss, the decriminalisation of the way a tiny percentage of the population chose to live. So, how did we get where we are today?
Parental responsibility, modesty and temptation
In the late nineteenth century, sex education was seen as a parental responsibility – publications were available to help parents inform their children about reproduction. Girls were sometimes taught about modesty and boys about temptation, but sex education didn’t figure in the school curriculum. The Second World War saw the first significant move to an education programme, prompted by a sudden increase in sexually transmitted diseases. Taught as ‘hygiene’, the principle aim of the programme was disease prevention.
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