Noboby leave the room, everyone listen to me, we had ten tampons at half past two, and now there's only three...

Prepare yourself for a new generation of perverts, drug abusers, teenage pregnancy, STD carriers and nymphomaniacs. Slightly hyperbolic I know but desperate measures calls for desperate rhetoric. What am I on about? I'm on about the government's ingenious idea of planning to make sex education compulsory in primary schools.

Yesterday's Guardian article quoted a spokesperson for Life Education: 'If we want to make a real and lasting difference to teenage drug and alcohol misuse, we must reach them early - at primary school'. Evidently the government has not had time to review the adverse effects of sex education in secondary schools. Minette Marrin in a recent Times online article points out:

[...] sex education has been an utter failure. The increase in sex education here in recent years has coincided with an explosion of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease (STD) far worse than anywhere else in Europe. Since the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy was introduced in 1999, the number of girls having abortions has soared. You might well be tempted to argue that sex education causes sexual delinquency.

It begs the question then that faced with such startling statistics why the government want to make sex education compulsory amongst children who still believe in mythical figures like the tooth fairy and Santa Clause.


My generation will be familiar with the science modules on human biology and how babies are made. I remember boys throwing about tampons and menstrual pads - shouting 'Here have a pillow' and sniggering. I'm not saying primary school kids will do this but something similar and more childish. Hitting each other with pads and using tampons as weapons - the latest James Bond gadget, may just be the norm. At the end of the school day teachers won't be asking where have all the scissors gone - but - nobody leave the room, everyone listen to me, we had ten tampons at half past two, and now there's only three. And so the search will begin. One tampon may be amongst the crayons, pretending to be a white crayon; remains may be found of one in the pet cage - what the hamster couldn't swallow and one in the teachers' tea - for scientific purpose of course, to see how much it can absorb.


Concern has been expressed by the sane about sexualising children by teaching them sex education but how do you desexualise sex? Perhaps we will be rigorously scientific and use scientific terms. A child who struggles with remembering and spelling difficult words is expected to take on board terms like vagina, placenta, fallopian tube, uterus, scrotum, prostate gland - need I go on? Maybe to help them learn we can have song-like-poems, like in Matilda - you know - Mrs D, Mrs I, Mrs F F I, Mrs C, Mrs U, Mrs L, T Y - spells difficulty. Mr T, Mr E, Mr S T, Mr I, Mr C, Mr L, Mr Eugh - spells trouble.


I'm over reacting as usual. We're going to teach them BASIC sex education. What is 'basic' sex education? Where do we draw the line? You don't think curiosity will get the better of them? That you can tell a ten year old that a sperm penetrates an egg in the ampulla of the fallopian tube and he or she will simply note it down and that would be all? That's 'basic'. What about all the follow up questions? Teaching little kids is difficult enough without having to teach them about sex.


The problem with a 'basic' and scientific description of sex and how babies are made is that it is bereft of all human emotion. Isn't that the very problem we are trying to overcome? That sex isn't treated as a wonderful way to express human emotion but a competition, a league table of how many you've scored.

And no one is thinking about the teachers! What about the teachers? Teaching a classroom of ten year olds the basics of sex could have a detrimental effect on their sex life! Little money, no peace, and now no sex. There goes a generation of potential teachers. Think of the hot flushes in the classroom. The staff room gossip - 'My year 4s asked me to demonstrate penetration'. And I guarantee you one cheeky ten year old will ask 'Sir, do you have sex? How often?'

Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm not modern enough, maybe I'm too old-fashioned, maybe I need to get with the times, maybe I'm prude or worse yet naive. But every fiber of my being and the little logic I possess vehemently and passionately tells me that teaching sex education at primary schools is wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong morally, wrong ethically, wrong politically. Period. Oh and good luck explaining that to a ten year old boy!