POLITICS
`The need for adequate sex education'
T.E.UTLEY
In a letter which he recently addressed to 68 Tory backbenchers, Chris Patten, Minister of State at the Department of Education and Science, is reported to have made this remarkable observation: 'If chil- dren are to be properly equipped to face the modern world they should receive adequate sex education.' He is said to have added: 'Pupils need to be equipped with the judgment, skills and moral sense neces- sary to make responsible choices for their lifestyles today and in the future.'
A good many fashionable heresies are incorporated in these quotations. Observe, for example, the plain implication of the first of them — that the need for adequate sex education is peculiar to `the modern world'. It is, of course, true that every generation believes, with some pride, that it has invented sex and the difficulties which go with it. I remember, as an undergraduate, listening to the famously `basic' lectures on English social history then delivered at Cambridge by the great economic historian, Welbourne, reputed to be the son of a Norfolk policeman. He liked to deride the habit which then pre- vailed among male undergraduates (the women of Girton and Newnham were discouraged from going to his lectures) of reading solemn manuals, by such authors as Havelock Ellis and Kenneth Walker, about sexual psychology and sexual tech- nology. He used to say, 'When I was a boy there was not a single lad in the village who, by the age of 16, could not lay a girl perfectly efficiently.' The 'modern world' has no more and no less need of sex instruction than any other age.
Then, consider this phrase about equip- ping pupils `with the judgment, skills and moral sense' necessary to making responsi- ble choices for something called their `lifestyles'. 'Equipped' is a really bureaucratic word. It suggests that moral- ity, perhaps procreation itself, will break down unless responsible people are charged and paid to instruct the young on how to go about things in the right way. Yet, the human race survived and a corpus of sexual morality was built up long before Mr Chris Patten came to our rescue.
Mr Patten was commending the Govern- ment's decision, made as a deathbed tri- bute to the moral majority, to make it statutorily obligatory for schools to give morally responsible sex instruction to their pupils. This is an absurd decision for various reasons. The first is that it is a decision which could never be effectively enforced. The second is that it invites a whole host of ineffectual legal actions to be undertaken by people anxious to demons- trate their very natural horror at the pernicious and perverted rubbish about sex now often being displayed before children by their teachers. The most absurd aspect of the proposal, however, is the assump- tion that what schoolmasters and school- mistresses tell their charges about this subject will have any effect anyway.
Indeed, one of the most hopeful features of the present scandalous state of affairs in our schools is the hostile reaction which it is likely to evoke from the young. For ages headmasters and housemasters in prepara- tory and public schools have given embar- rassed little talks about sex to their boys, and I have no doubt the same thing has gone on in girls' schools. The only effect on the audiences, who for the most part are already at least as well-informed as their instructors, has been to prompt ribald imitations in the dormitories. It is to be hoped that the same kind of irreverence will be inspired by the kind of sex instruc- tion which goes on in places like Haringey.
No, the young cannot be 'equipped' with a moral code in such matters by legislation. Parents can do something and, for the rest, children suck in their moral convictions from the cultural climate in which they live. These days this presents most of them with a poor lookout, but not one which. Mr Patten can do much to improve.
The Government is, of course, right to try to detach itself from the advanced view that heterosexuality, homosexuality, bes- tiality and any other variants which local education authorities may think up are all `lifestyles' which should be seriously consi- dered by the young with a view to making a making a responsible choice. ,It would be welcome if the Government increased the power of school govenors, and better still the power of parents to remove their children from schools where nonsense and filth are disseminated to less enthusiastic establishments, though I still maintain that the more sensible parent might prefer to expose his child to the sexual instruction of corrupt pedagogues in order to join with him later in exposing these lessons to humorous analysis. However, there can be no conceivable reason, either liberal or traditionalist, for denying parents the right to withdraw their children from sex instruc- tion. On this point, the Government should yield.
By the same token, I think it is high time that the state stopped giving what is called `religious instruction' in schools. I do not mean that children should not be taught Scripture, as it used to be called; that is another rather ribald subject, which can be efficiently taught by non-believers, which is culturally valuable and which consists in such things as teaching the young the names of all the Kings of Israel and the number of stripes received by St Paul. Nowadays, however, religious instruction concerns it- self with such matters as discerning the similarities between Mrs Thatcher and Hitler (this is a literal example, I am told) and speculating about what Jesus would have said about inner cities.
Religious instruction properly so-called should be given by clergymen, who are in need of more work appropriate to their vocations. A good many of them, particu- larly those who are not bishops or deans, are desperately in need of money, and I suspect that the poorer they are the more devout and sensible they are. The Govern- ment should subsidise religious teaching in state schools, offering jobs to all clergy of respectable denominations. 'All you will cry (being, as I suspect many of you are, products of a depraved liberal culture), `who is to say what is respectable?' Well, the answer is the state is to say. There is absolutely no way in which a civilised government can divest itself wholly of the responsibility for expressing society's view of what is and what is not morally toler- able. Roman Catholics could be paid for giving religious instruction, Scientologists and Children of God could not. The Muslims have their own after-school schools in this country, and the pupils turn up next day in the state sector beaten black and blue, which is what the Muslims like.
My grand philosophical theme is this: it is not the business of the state to 'equip' us with a moral code (after all, in practice the state means Mr Chris Patten and the like). It is not either the business of the state to be morally neutral. It is its business to give a nudge here and there in favour of what society believes to be good and, for this purpose, it should use the agencies which nature and history have provided.
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