Should 11- and 12-year-olds be placed in a mixed-sex classroom where they are shown videos featuring images of naked males and females in various stages of development, a bra and a tampon, an infra-red demonstration of an erection, and a live birth?
That's what happened recently at Shakopee Middle School, some parents told the Shakopee Valley News. The parents said that their kids were embarrassed and confused. One boy pulled his shirt over his head so he didn't have to watch. A girl came home in tears.
Shakopee school authorities apparently view such explicit curricula as standard practice for sixth-grade sex education. But parents maintain that the information was too much, too soon; that boys and girls should have been taught separately; and that the school's clinical approach stripped sex of its larger context of meaning and beauty.
When arguments over sex ed arise, school authorities often dismiss objecting parents as woefully behind the times. Today's sex-ed promoters seem to view their work as cutting edge, bringing new openness to a previously taboo subject.
But could it be sex educators who are stuck in old, discredited ways of thinking?
The sex reform movement actually began in the 1880s, according to Rochelle Gurstein in her book "The Repeal of Reticence." Proponents of "sex hygiene," as it was called, started with the premise that the myriad problems related to sex -- venereal disease, prostitution, out of wedlock births, unhappy marriages -- were the result of a stuffy Victorian prudery.
To counter this, reformers embraced a radical new doctrine of "openness." They saw sex as a pure, natural act that religion and superstition had perverted, according to Gurstein. Sex would become wholesome again, they insisted, if people began to think of it in rational, scientific terms.
Reformers advocated using clinical terms to speak of sex. It was a bodily function, they said, which must be treated no differently than digestion -- "the slow churning of the stomach."
