The ninth grade hygiene course that was designed to teach about sex...

The ninth grade hygiene course that was designed to teach about sex for boys was, in my opinion, a farce. The teacher, I think, was trying to become one of the guys and had almost a leering attitude about sex. The one moral view he gave us was, "Watch out, you could get venereal disease or make some girl pregnant." Another reason for the uselessness of this class was that it came too late in our lives. Most boys had reached puberty and had sexual information of some kind or another either from their parents or peers.

My parents thought I was getting the "facts" in school; however, our biology teacher never got beyond the basis of paramecium reproduction. In high school we kept re-learning all about the menstrual cycle in the woman and that was about all. In one of my physical education courses, the teachers had cut out the last section of all textbooks concerning childbirth.
In high school I can't remember receiving any sex education. However, the general idea was that the girls who didn't know much were the girls who were good and innocent. The type of girls who knew much about sex were the ones who were wondered about and sometimes looked down upon. This was an ideal that was set up much to our disadvantage.
Although my biology instructor had access to recordings on sex education, she refused to play them to our class, although we asked her to.

Most of the information (in a senior social studies class) involved the social nature of sex; venereal disease, for example. It was presented from a negative viewpoint; sex was something to be avoided at all costs until marriage, at which time the first night in bed would be the apotheosis of everything we have ever lived or would live for. I must disagree with the approach used. I do not think that sex should be presented in its absolutely idealized form, as it was here. Without fail, a presentation of this type will result in disillusionment and confusion on the part of impressionable adolescents.

I feel that there is no substitute for realism, and that a subject as important to later life and development as sex must be presented in a realistic manner, even at the lower levels. All in all, however, I must rank the course as a rather valuable one. It brought out personal points that I had overlooked for too long, and incited thoughts on other aspects of sex with which I was unfamiliar.

Sex education, if it begins too late in the young person's life and if it is then aimed at classes of both boys and girls, can be shocking to young people involved. The school needs to take this into consideration. Likely there would be no such shock even in mixed classes if sex education were begun well before puberty, before young people are emotional about the subject. For example, I visited mixed classes of ten year olds in Sweden in 1973. They were receiving sex education on menstruation, coitus (including diagrams showing the erect penis in the vagina), and conception, with little or no apparent negative affect.

The following situation took place when I (a girl) was in the seventh grade. We were on the unit on human reproduction. The class hour before we saw the film (a film on human reproduction) our teacher told us about viewing the movie. He said he didn't want to embarrass us and if we didn't want to see it, we didn't have to. The day of the film almost everyone was there, but it was very tense in the classroom.