PETER HITCHENS: After 70 years of sex education, we have proof that it doesn't work.
Who invented sex education? Since we now have so much of it that we can barely escape it, it seems a reasonable question. This is even more important now that we know it does not work.
Last week’s appalling figures for syphilis and gonorrhoea cases – pretty much the worst in modern times – showed beyond doubt that Sex Ed has not prevented the spread of sexual diseases.
The same is true of the huge abortion figures (do you remember when they said legalising that would make it ‘safe, legal and rare’? Not exactly). Without the ever-increasing use of the ‘morning after pill’, which conceals rather than solves the problem, it would be even worse. Meanwhile, family life, as we knew it only a short time ago, is vanishing from large parts of the British landscape.
Instead the state is the main parent. The 1980 prediction by Lady Helen Brook that, ‘From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State to take major decisions – objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child’, has pretty much come true for millions.
I am endlessly amazed that so few people ever pause to wonder why sex education – such a major feature of our schools – receives so little critical attention, especially since it obviously does not work on its own terms. It has always gone hand in hand with a parallel campaign to make contraceptives available, first to the unmarried and then to any child without his or her parents’ knowledge. These policies also failed in their official aim. Is it perhaps possible that its real aim is not the stated aim?
Who invented sex education? Since we now have so much of it that we can barely escape it, it seems a reasonable question.aded:
Sex ed has failed to achieve its official targets pretty much since it first began to spread here in the early 1950s. Yet the only response of its advocates is to say that we need more of it, at younger and younger ages, ever more explicit and radical and virtually compulsory at many ages.
Is it possible that it has another intention, one that it has successfully achieved? As far as I can find out, its inventor and pioneer was a Hungarian Communist whose worrying motto was: ‘Who will save us from Western Civilisation?’ This zealot, Georg Lukacs (pronounced ‘Loo Catch’), is still much admired by many on the Left. And he was put in charge of the schools in Budapest during the brief but horrible Hungarian Soviet Republic, which rose and fell there in 1919.
Lukacs became the People’s Commissar for Education and Culture, and he knew exactly what he wanted. Special lectures and specially printed pamphlets were swiftly introduced. Their aim was to ‘instruct’ children about ‘free love’, not to mention ‘the nature of sexual intercourse’. But the classes also preached that traditional Christian family codes of behaviour, especially lifelong marriage, were outdated.
Religion was dismissed as an irrelevant nuisance which deprived mankind of pleasure. Children were urged to reject and deride the authority of their parents and the Church, and to ignore the accepted moral code. Lukacs and the rest of them were gone in months, but his time has now definitely come round again. The revolutionaries who failed so badly to build Utopia a century ago did not give up their aims. They still know they are right, and they are trying again. They just changed their methods.
No more barricades and street fights. Instead they are overturning the ideas that once held Western civilisation together. And they are doing it in a school near you. MOS.
Blogger: to answer the question "Who invented today's sex education?" - My slightly different guess is Leon Trotsky. (And yes, I did use to teach Sex Ed - rather morally and intelligently, if I may say so!)
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