Faith, Hope, and Chastity
Is there any good way to teach your kids about sex?
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Now, soap opera aside, none of this may seem like that big of a deal. The school board doesn’t write legislation; it just carries it out. It isn’t allowed to edit the textbooks anymore. All the board can do now is issue the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) guidelines and adopt books that match them. But at this most basic level, the board is responsible for just about everything students are taught.
By 2004, publishers mindful of the millions of dollars at stake had learned to steer clear of controversy. The TEKS guidelines state unequivocally that textbooks must “analyze the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of barrier protection and other contraceptive methods including the prevention of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs), keeping in mind the effectiveness of remaining abstinent until marriage.” But publishers detected a loophole that would keep their books agreeable to those who believed in abstinence-only education: The TEKS guidelines had not distinguished between teacher and student editions. Erring on the side of caution, most publishers restricted all information about condoms and contraceptives to the teacher’s manual and supplementary materials. Two of the four student editions up for adoption used the mysterious phrase “barrier protection,” with no elaboration. Instead of receiving information about what barrier protection was and how it might work to prevent pregnancy and STDs, students were given generic advice that had little to do with sexual activity. One book recommended that students “get plenty of rest” in order to make good decisions.
The board met to consider these textbooks in July and September of 2004. More than one hundred people testified or submitted written testimony. Those who testified in person were given three minutes each to make their case. According to Gordon Crofoot, a specialist in HIV and STD treatment and research, many of the board members appeared totally uninterested in his testimony. Crofoot cares for about one thousand patients in his practice in Houston and is currently seeing more young patients with HIV than he has in his 31 years of practice.
“These textbooks do not meet the criteria and are factually and scientifically incorrect in what they say,” he told the board, “but their major fault is in what they don’t say and the resulting consequences. . . . If we do nothing [about STDs], the direct cost over the next ten years would be $10.6 billion. Comprehensive sex education programs might reduce this cost by fifty percent. Can Texas afford this cost?”
Crofoot was cut off when his three minutes were up. He offered to answer any questions. The board had none. Later in the day, he watched as Beverly Nuckols, a family doctor in New Braunfels opposed to comprehensive sex ed, was asked about the implications of human papillomavirus for men. She answered that HPV affected women differently than men before stating her position that condom instruction, in her experience as a family doctor, would do little good. “Yesterday I saw a boy who had had three partners in the last month,” she said. “He’s had twenty-two partners. He’s eighteen. He uses condoms every time. Unfortunately, a lot of the times he’s drunk and so they break or they don’t work. I mean, condoms are not a solution for teenagers outside of monogamous relationships. They don’t use them right even if we teach them.”
The majority of the board members viewed the placement of the word “condom” in the teacher’s edition, and not the student edition, as a good idea and not in violation of the TEKS mandate to “analyze the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of  barrier protection and other contraceptive methods.” Abstinence proponents applauded their judgment. Kyleen Wright, the president of the Texans for Life Coalition, an antiabortion advocacy group based in Irving, testified, “The placement of sensitive information in the teacher’s edition is a brilliant win-win move on the part of publishers. . . . The comprehensive-education crowd has run this show since I was in high school. And on their watch, we have seen skyrocketing teen pregnancy rates and sexually transmitted disease. Nowhere can they point to any success with their programs. You are on the right track and I thank you.”
Before the four textbooks were approved, Democratic member Mavis B. Knight asked the board, “Does anyone have any data to correlate dropout or the reduction in the teen pregnancy rate with this abstinence approach?” No one in the room had that data. A consensus would have been difficult to find.
None of the hullabaloo in the world of sex ed is new, of course. University of Kansas history professor Jeffrey P. Moran notes in Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century that the inspiration for sex instruction began in the 1800’s, when a strange creature emerged in the family unit, a new category of person too young to be an adult but too mature to be a child. “Due perhaps to nutritional changes,” Moran writes, “the average age at puberty declined over the course of the century, so young people were becoming sexually mature earlier in life.” At the same time, men and women were delaying marriage until they found themselves on more-secure financial footing. This category of citizenry was such an anomaly, historically, that in 1904 a psychologist had to invent a word to describe it: “adolescence.”
But this new group did not immediately draw the attention of social reformers. The first sex ed program, initiated in 1913 by a group of progressives who’d formed the chastely named American Social Hygiene Association, targeted adults. Swarms of men were visiting bordellos and spreading infections around the country, and initially, the social hygienists attempted to frighten audiences with slide-show presentations exhibiting the most visually upsetting effects of syphilis. On occasion, spectators did faint (a marker of success).
But eventually adults were deemed corrupted goods, impervious to instruction. Scanning the landscape for an unspoiled population, the social hygienist crusade focused its efforts on the adolescents. Youngsters, furthermore, could be reached with ease since more of them were attending schools than in preceding decades. Nevertheless, the proposition that sex be taught to children in a public setting was a tough sell. In 1913 high schoolers in Chicago were the first to receive sex ed (younger students received “personal purity” talks). The experiment was short-lived. After just one year of lectures on “personal sexual hygiene” and “problems of sex instincts,” as well as “a few of the hygienic and social facts regarding venereal disease,” conservative members of the Chicago school board saw to it that the controversial curriculum was rarely taught again.
But the movement would not die. According to Alfred Kinsey’s 1953 report “Sexual Behavior and the Human Female,” each generation of women born after 1900 became sexually active earlier than the last. In the twenties, veterans who had returned from World War I with disease were contaminating reputable young ladies. Recognizing that fear of cupid’s itch was not a sufficient motivator for chastity, educators began to stress the immorality of sex outside marriage and the reckless behavior’s potential damage to marital bliss.
Morality, it turned out, was the key to making sex ed palatable, and as the focus shifted from sex itself to related subjects like marriage and parenthood, the programs became so diffuse that for the next few decades they could hardly be called sex ed at all.
Then came the pill. The Food and Drug Administration’s approval of oral contraceptives in 1960 transformed the way women thought about sex. The percentage of sexually active eighteen-year-old women rose from about 25 percent in the late fifties to 35 percent in the late sixties to more than 50 percent by the end of the seventies. Meanwhile, the median age of first marriage steadily climbed. With more people having sex outside marriage, sex ed became increasingly important.
Except that according to critics, sex ed simply exacerbated the problem. Politicians charged that American society was suffering from an epidemic of teenage pregnancy. In reality, the rate of teenage pregnancy from 1960 to 1975 remained constant and the birthrate declined; the sense of there being an “epidemic” was a result of more unwed teen mothers, not more pregnancies. But to abstinence supporters, teenage sexual activity itself rang the alarm bells. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan signed the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), which mandated that the programs funded with its $4 million be based in the teaching of abstinence. University of California at Berkeley sociology professor Kristin Luker writes in her book When Sex Goes to School that, as near as she could tell, “AFLA is where the idea of ‘abstinence education’ made its debut on the national scene.”
The perils of teenage motherhood were soon overshadowed by a much more ominous threat. AIDS didn’t seem to be a prevalent problem among teens in the early eighties, but the specter of the disease caused many sex ed traditionalists to abandon their misgivings about unambiguous instruction. In 1987, 70 percent of girls and 80 percent of boys had had sex before reaching age twenty, yet only 15 percent of the girls surveyed said they had recently used a condom. Reagan’s surgeon general C. Everett Koop strongly advocated educating kids about condoms. “When we talk about condoms,” he said, “the education that goes with that has to be extraordinarily explicit.”
As AIDS education became the focus of sex ed and condom instruction became more widespread, educators were teaching that abstinence was the best way to prevent pregnancy and STDs. Still, critics of these programs said the emphasis on “safe sex” sent a mixed message that encouraged kids to indulge in their basest desires. Worse, for some detractors, the curricula didn’t address the immorality of sex outside marriage. In 1987 William J. Bennett, Secretary of Education under Reagan, wrote of mainstream sex education: “While speaking to an important aspect of human life, it displays a conscious aversion to making moral distinctions.”
Abstinence-only education took a while to gain momentum, but once it did, it revolutionized the discourse. In 1996 a provision under Title V of the Social Security Act was attached to welfare legislation that would finance abstinence programs with $50 million a year, to be distributed among participating states that agreed to match every four federal dollars with three state dollars. This gave abstinence ed the boost it needed. In 1988 only 2 percent of programs taught that abstinence was the only way to eliminate the risk of contracting STDs or becoming pregnant; by 1999, that number had increased to 23 percent.
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