Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term sex education covers a multitude of approaches, meanings, and pedagogical strategies. It is highly contextual, with localized cultures and understandings making significant differences both to the purposes and practices involved. It is also often highly politicized. Sex education in both the UK and US has its origins in what Frank Mort (1987) , among others, has termed the “medico-moral” discourses of the second half of the nineteenth century. However, as Pilcher (2005 : 154) points out, the inclusion of sex education in the British school curriculum was controversial, since children were seen as simultaneously innocent and easily corruptible (a theme that has persisted into the twenty-first century). Pilcher describes how serious concerns about the prevalence and spread of syphilis and gonorrhea, especially during World War I, propelled sex education into the school curriculum. The UK government subsequently began to provide funding for the National Council for Combating Venereal Disease (later the British Schools Hygiene Council) to carry out sex education in schools and also encouraged the introduction of lessons about sex hygiene and reproduction in biology lessons. This direct funding was withdrawn and discretional funding for sex education devolved to local education authorities in the late 1920s. Often, they chose not to provide such instruction, particularly after ... log in or subscribe to read full text