In 1994, Clinton administration Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, was forced to resign amid stinging condemnation of her stance on a major political issue: sex. In front of an audience, Dr. Elders said that she was in favor of masturbation being taught as part of children's sex education curriculum, noting that it was a safer alternative to high-risk sex. Dr. Elders drew ire from conservative officials and members of her own Democratic party. Her views on pro-choice policies, the legalization of certain drugs, and distributing contraceptives in schools to minimize the spread of STIs made her lightning rod of controversy during her tenure as Surgeon General. So, an aversion to kids being taught about the more indelicate parts of sex by school officials turned out to be an unexpected bipartisan unifier. But we've come a long way in our collective knowledge on sex since pamphlets in the 1830s and before, which describe masturbation as self-pollution that could lead to blindness and insanity. But the core questions that make school administrators so darn squeamish about sex ed have remained relatively unchanged. Namely, what, if any, information on sex should school curriculums include, and how much is enough, or too much? And should schools be in the business of doling out info on sexual health at all?

(Describer) Title: Origin of Everything.

Prior to the 20th century, information on sex and sexuality was largely confined to two spheres: homes and religious institutions. Students and children, in general, were expected to gain any knowledge of the mysteries of human sexuality from their parents or their religious leaders. Schools didn't disseminate information about sex at all because in the U.S. they were largely privately owned and operated until the tail end of the 19th century. This was for a variety of reasons, including the fact that schooling wasn't mandatory for all children in the U.S., and schools weren't usually run by government agencies. Although the Boston Latin School was the first public school opened in 1635 in what would later become the United States, governments didn't have control over things such as admissions and curriculums. This took a huge turn in the late 19th century when, after the Industrial Revolution, reformers and educators began to push the concept that all children should be educated. And though there a definition of "all" often meant young white boys, ideas about the virtues of education became more widespread. Facilities for female students, Black students, orphan students, poor students, and students of color began to expand rapidly with the common mission to provide some form of education to the masses. But subjects vary dramatically from school to school. Some elite institutions focused on a classic education that centered around things like Latin, Greek, and the humanities. Others were trade schools that placed higher importance on teaching skills for the workforce, and others still were religious schools that coupled moral instruction with education. Then, in the early 20th century, governments across the U.S. and Europe began to do two things. First, they started to regulate child labor practices, meaning that kids couldn't work for untold numbers of hours. In 1938, this culminated with the passage in the U.S. of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the minimum work age at 14, 16 during the school year, 14 for afterschool jobs, and 18 for dangerous jobs. And secondly, governments started to regulate how many years students had to stay in school, then raised that age to 16 and later 18. Massachusetts passed the first mandatory Schooling Act in the U.S. in 1852, and Mississippi was the final state to pass one in 1918. So, work hours were greatly reduced while school hours saw a sharp incline. And you can learn more about this in our video, "Why is 18 Considered an Adult?" And once students started spending the majority of their active hours from Monday to Friday in schools, schools began to take on a greater social significance and importance in the lives of their students. So, school attendance was mandatory nationwide by 1918, and the numbers of children being placed in school steadily increased after that after the laws were enforced. But the first instance of the American government getting in on the sex-ed front didn't take place in classrooms. Rather, it took place in the Army. After widespread outbreaks of STIs during World War I, Congress passed the Chamberlain-Kahn Act in 1918. Folded into this law was language on educating soldiers about the dangers of widespread venereal diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea. This education largely came in the form of clinics, pamphlets, and lectures. There were also waves of government memoranda on health that were released at the same time. They taught new recruits about clean water, proper sanitation, vaccinations, and personal hygiene, plus a fair amount of discussion about how to properly dispose of poop. The Chamberlain-Kahn Act was especially centered around keeping military bases and the surrounding areas identified as extra-cantonment zones and health reports free from disease. At around this same time, police and government officials were given the authority to arrest and detain anyone they suspected was carrying an STI in and around Army bases. But the prevailing misinformation at the time was that the primary carriers of these diseases were only women, civilians, and sex workers. Thousands of women were arrested and detained in state-managed prisons and hospitals all under the supposition that they were either infecting soldiers or moving closer to military bases because they were sex workers. The Chamberlain-Kahn era of sexual education is widely considered extreme and a human-rights violation today. But the agenda outlined in the act, in fact, demonstrates the longstanding relationship between the government, sexual instruction, and overall health of its citizens. So, sex has frequently been aligned with the concepts of overall health hygiene and disease prevention. But when did schools get in on the act? In his book, "Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education," Historian Jonathan Zimmerman traces the history of when sex ed entered schools around the world. He begins his study with an anecdote about a failed measure brought before the League of Nations in 1928 by the British delegation. Zimmerman notes how the British delegation proposed that the League should support the worldwide expansion of sexual instruction of schools under the heading of "biological education." They used founded fears about the spread of venereal diseases mixed with unfounded fears and coded language about eugenics and racial purity. Although the measure didn't advance, sex ed in the post-war period did begin to take root in countries like Japan, the U.S., and Great Britain. Governments and healthcare officials were becoming more aware that reliable information on sexual health was scarce amongst the general public, and they were also invested in things like maintaining the health and purity of their citizens and soldiers. With the spread of compulsory education, schools became the one place where health officials had a truly captive audience. Plus, when it became mandatory, they can guarantee, in theory, that all children were getting this vital information. Along with the expansion of state-run schools nationwide in the early 20th century came a slew of ideas about what responsibility educators and governments had to the children in their care. At different points in time, the agenda of sex education was taken up or abandoned based on shifts in the answer to this question of moral responsibility. Early sexual education rolled out piecemeal, during the 1920s to the 1950s, with Sweden becoming the first country in the world to require sex ed for all students in 1956. And although the U.S. has often had a contentious and spotty history with sex education, the U.S. has also been an early adopter of giving students information about the birds and the bees. But the controversies that erupted around the 1928 push in the League of Nations to spread sex ed worldwide sound pretty much identical to the arguments heard today, minus the stuff about eugenics. And this essentially breaks down into three categories. The first is that sex ed and sexuality is a topic that should be left up to parents. In fact, Zimmerman notes how many early opposers of teaching sex in schools thought that schools were encroaching on the territory of moral instruction that should be the rightful domain of parents. Some said that sex was best taught by mothers without the influence of local governments. Second is that integrating sex into schools often brings the burning question: How much is too much front and center? While some think any education on the topic of sex is a bad thing, others disagree and think that students should learn vital facts and unbiased knowledge. But even among those who think that sex ed is a good thing, opinions vary about exactly what to teach. Some want an all-inclusive sex-ed curriculum that teaches about safe sex, answers students' health questions, and also looks at the wider and more complex spectrum of human sexuality. Others think that sex ed should be tied to other types of moral instruction, which has included methods that centered on family-life education and traditional family planning in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, hysteria about the rise of teen pregnancies led to courses where sex was discussed largely using euphemisms and metaphors about animals and plants. But in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, comprehensive sex ed that taught about disease prevention did experience a boom in the late 1980s until the mid 1990s. On the other hand, around the same time, you began getting federal support for abstinence-only education. And in the late 1990s, abstinence-only-until-marriage programs exploded nationwide. Returning to the days when only basic facts and abstinence outside of marriage was the standard method of sex ed, absence-only education has been linked to poor outcomes for students overall. And the third reason centers not on clueless kids, anxious administrators, and peeved parents, but rather on the often forgotten middle guy-- that's right, teachers. Because even though mandates and guidelines get handed down from government officials and parents may picket the school board meetings if they don't get their way, at the end of the day, it's teachers who are left to dole out this information to waiting pupils. And just like with any subject, essentially what a kid learns or doesn't learn is left up to who's holding the chalk at the front of the room. I just realized that "chalk at the front of the room" may be an outdated metaphor, but we'll go with it. Zimmerman points out that, by 1969, in sex-ed pioneer Sweden, more than one third of Swedish students had never encountered sex ed in the classroom, even though it had been compulsory since the 1950s. Teachers admitted to being uninformed, unprepared, and sometimes embarrassed to bring up the topic in front of students, which led them to skip over it altogether. And in 2006, 90% of Swedish teachers still agreed that they had received little or no preparation in teaching sex ed. And in the U.S., similar problems persist, since the choices made in the classroom are often left up to the discretion of local governments and oversight is extremely localized, leading to mixed results for every student. So, early 20th century sex ed was largely about keeping armies around the world healthy before it evolved to include topics like pregnancy, sexuality, and relationships. And if the stories from the past sound shockingly like the same backlash that led to Dr. Elders' firing in 1994, it's because attitudes towards integrating sex into general education haven't budged much in hundreds of years. So, there you have it. You've learned the history of sex ed, so hopefully we won't be doomed to repeat it because that would be way too awkward.