116. Sex - Elucidation and Education

As part of his personal and social education course at school, my 10 year-old nephew has recently filled out a questionnaire that was compiled for his school by the Freedom Institute.

His school, the United Nations International School in New York, informed the students’ parents that the survey was part of their ongoing partnership with the students aimed to, “foster protective and resiliency factors in their education” - whatever the hell that means!  It caused disquiet and considerable unease among some of the parents because of the nature of some of the questions/statements.

The statement that seemed to cause the most concern was, “It is important for me not to have sex at my age.”  The students who are all aged ten or eleven had to mark it on a scale of 1 – 10, where 1 is “not true” and 10 is “very true”. 

The parents’ concerns were not with the clumsy and inelegant grammar of the statement but with the content.  They didn’t think that their children should be thinking deeply about their sexuality at the age of ten.

Sex education in schools is a topic fraught with difficulties.  Parents have the choice to withdraw their children from sex education lessons.  When I was a teacher and had to educate a class of children in matters sexual, none was withdrawn from the course of lessons and so, one morning in January 1974, I stood in front of a group of 11 year-olds who had no idea what that day’s lesson was to be about and certainly had no idea how apprehensive their teacher was feeling.

Of course I was worried and concerned.  When I realised the previous September that I would have to teach sex education, I accepted an opportunity to go on a course to learn how it should be done.  I had been taught how to teach geography so why not be taught how to teach sex?

One morning in November I walked into the meeting hall at Haringey Civic Centre where a woman was sitting at a desk on a platform facing several rows of chairs.  That was satisfying.  With something like 100 people in the room, it would be be possible to be completely anonymous.  I would be able to just sit there, take a few notes and then slip away.  With any luck I would be able to go through the entire day without saying a word.

Two people had arrived before me and they were both sitting near the front.  Both were women and one of them was a nun.  For some time the four of us sat in an uncomfortable silence.  Then, the woman on the platform looked at her watch, cleared her throat and spoke:

“We may as well make a start.  It doesn’t look as though anyone else is coming.  Would you all like to move to the front and introduce yourselves?”

I let out a deep sigh, rose grudgingly from my seat on the very back row and shuffled slowly and reluctantly past row after row of empty seats to the front.  I sat down next to the nun.

“Terry Wilton, Creighton School, Muswell Hill.”

I learnt that the nun was from a Convent school in Enfield and the other woman was the Head of a school in Haringey.  The course leader was a Haringey health advisor.  I never got to find out who had been responsible for publicising the course but whoever it was had failed miserably.

Exercise 1

The first activity we did was to list all the words that children might use to describe those parts of the body concerned with sex and all the words that are used to describe the sex act.  I was still sulking and as far as I can remember my only contribution was “nob”. 

The nun, who was acting as scribe, asked if “nob” was spelt with a ‘k’.  I said it didn’t matter but no, it wasn’t.  The course leader said it certainly was spelt with a ‘k’.  I asked her if it really mattered.  She said it that it did matter and went off to find a dictionary.  Ten minutes later she returned triumphant and announced it was spelt, K N O B.  I asked again if it really mattered but she ignored me.

I was really grumpy now and I asked what was the purpose of this exercise.  We were told that it was so that we wouldn’t feel any sort of embarrassment when saying or hearing a word like “fuck” later in the day or in our school lesson.  I was 26 at the time and had been a member of cricket and rugby clubs since I was 12.  I think that I had heard them all by then but maybe the nun hadn’t.

The lesson I taught that was based on Exercise 1

The class was put into groups of four.  At the top of sheets of sugar paper was written one word that had come out of class discussion, such as “penis” and below that word, the group had to write all the synonyms they could think of.  I told them not to bother about spelling.

This was a teaching strategy to get all the rude, slang words out in the open at the start so that we could then ignore them or use them without sniggering.  They agreed though that in discussion they would try to use the correct word every time. 

Twenty sheets with twenty words did the rounds.  The groups were given a minute or two per word and then the sheet was passed on.  Twenty minutes into the lesson I heard one of the children shout out, “Anyone not had oral sex yet?”

At the end of the lesson, the only word to have an empty sheet was, “clitoris”.  There are two reasons for that.  Firstly, there aren’t any short slang terms for it (at least none that I know) and secondly, for all of the boys and almost all the girls, it was a word that they had never come across before.

Exercise 2

This involved rôle play.  The headteacher paired up with the course leader and I worked with the nun.  One of the pair had to play the part of the teacher while the other was an inquisitive pupil.  I was the pupil.

Cards were provided with the sort of question that might be asked in class.  The nun playing the rôle of ‘teacher’ was to answer my questions in an honest, open and matter of fact way.

“What’s a dildo?” I asked her.

“I haven’t the faintest idea.  Never heard of it,” she said.  “Do you know?”

There are probably very few people in the world who have ever found themselves in the position that I was in: telling a nun what a dildo was and how it was used.

The lesson I taught that was based on Exercise 2

Every student was given small sheets of paper.  They wrote any questions they had on the paper and nothing was off limits.  They folded the paper over and then put all the anonymous questions into a bowl.  I took out a question at random, read it out aloud and then answered it as best I could.

The questions were anonymous and on cards in a bowl because it meant that anything could be asked without embarrassment but more importantly, if I picked out any question I didn’t know the answer to, I could ignore it.

Some of them showed incredible innocence.  “Can a baby be born without a man?” was one of those.  Others were more difficult to answer like, “How many times can you have sex in a night?”

There was one question that I recall vividly.  When I answered it, the response I got from one of the girls sitting near the front was so comical that I remember it very clearly today, forty years later.  I can even recollect the girl’s name.  She is over fifty now and may be a grandmother and so I won’t divulge it.

“How big is a penis?” was the question I solemnly read out to the class.

“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath, “it varies.  They vary in size like an arm or a leg.”

“As big as that?” the girl shrieked, while the boys all shuffled in their seats looking sheepish.

In the bowl there were more than 100 questions and some were asked more than once.  One question was asked more than any other and it makes me feel as good to remember it today as it did when I kept coming across it during that lesson:

“How do you know when you are in love?”

About two years later, I saw a job advertised at the school run by the headteacher who had been with me on the course.  One of the reasons I didn’t apply for that job was that I didn’t want her to meet me in an interview and for her to remember that the last time we had met, reading from a card, I had asked her if she ever masturbated.