Great Britain: Where every child will learn about sex

If a man in the street started talking to your 5-year-old about her genitals, he’d be thrown into prison, said Peter Hitchens in the London Mail on Sunday. But when the government does it, “this is praised as enlightened social policy.” Get used to it. The government has announced that all pupils, from kindergarten through high school, are to be force-fed a curriculum of sex education. No schools may opt out—not even Catholic schools. Bureaucrats say they want to prevent teen pregnancy, but it’s obvious that the real agenda of the sex ed promoters is to spread leftist orthodoxy. “They wish to destroy childhood innocence and smash the remaining influence of religion.”

Let’s not overreact, said Carol Sarler in the London Times. Learning the biological facts of sex is not going to hurt anyone. “There is no sensible reason why a child of any age may not know which bit goes where.” What alarms me is the government’s insistence that this new sex curriculum include advice on relationships. How are teachers supposed to explain how and why people fall in love, cheat, forgive, or divorce when hundreds of years of literature haven’t sufficed?

They can’t, said Lesley Thomas in the London Daily Telegraph, especially when the teachers tend to be “23-year-olds straight out of teacher training college.” What will they tell the kids about relationships? “If he doesn’t call by Wednesday, he’s not interested?” In all seriousness, negotiating love and intimacy is not an academic subject. “How to behave in matters of the heart is a matter for individual morality.” Guidance should come from parents, not teachers—and certainly not the government.

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In an ideal world, all parents would teach their children about romance, said Petra Boynton in the London Mirror. But that’s not the world we live in. Britain has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe, and it isn’t because our kids don’t know how babies are made or where to buy a condom. It’s because they don’t know how to say no to sex. This is the kind of relationship advice that the new curriculum will offer. Teenagers “want to know how to talk to someone they fancy, how to negotiate a relationship, and, very important, how to negotiate and set sexual boundaries.” If relationship education helps even just a few children avoid going further than they’re ready to go, it will be worthwhile. Sex is everywhere in this society. Talking about it with the kids is not “going to corrupt them.”