Sex, Tests, And Parental Roles

TEACHING SEX: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century , by Jeffrey P. Moran. (Harvard, $27.95.) Although it takes many forms and serves many purposes nowadays, sex education had one principal goal when first introduced into the curriculum in the early 1900s—to inform kids of the supposed scientific link between sexual immorality and disease. As Moran, an assistant professor of history at the University of Kansas, describes it, doctors would visit schools and warn students that casual sex would almost certainly lead to syphilis or gonorrhea, their scabrous descriptions sometimes inducing fainting.

While scare tactics would continue to have a place in sex education, this doomsday phase did not last long, mainly because parents and school boards objected to any discussion of sexuality, even when intended to promote chastity. Still, sex education, Moran tells us, did not go away; it simply went "underground," taught almost unnoticed in biology classes with the birds and the bees.

Sex education entered a more active phase in the late '40s. Several key factors contributed to the shift, among them the introduction of penicillin, which transformed VD into a mere inconvenience, and the widely publicized Kinsey studies, which demonstrated that men and women were more sexually adventuresome than previously thought. Sex educators, then called "family life educators," acknowledged, for the first time, that a healthy sex life was actually good—even necessary—within the context of marriage. Of course, sex before marriage was still considered crippling; teens were told it would render them incapable...