The session of the 9th grade health class at Oak Park-River Forest High School is supposed to be about the side effects of marijuana, but the disheveled, brush-cut freshman sitting in the back of the second row is worried about something besides drug abuse.
”If we`re going to have drug tests,” he tells his teacher, Roseanne Dusek, ”we might as well have AIDS tests, because we have to get rid of AIDS. I`m going to college, and that`s when you`re supposed to have fun.”
The students around him erupt with laughter, but the teenager`s fear that AIDS might rob him of his love life isn`t really funny. Suddenly, everyone else forgets about marijuana and questions about AIDS fly: How do you get it? If you have the AIDS virus, does that mean you automatically get the disease sometime in your life? It doesn`t matter, does it, someone snickers, because only ”homos” get it, right?
Dusek changes gears abruptly from dope to sex and begins waging war with ignorance. Painstakingly and simply she explains how the AIDS virus causes antibodies to form in a person`s body and how doctors can test for the antibodies in blood samples. We don`t know, she says, if the presence of the virus means that sooner or later you will contract AIDS. Sometimes the disease lies dormant for years. And finally, she tells the wiseacre homophobe, heterosexuals can get AIDS, too. The disease can be transmitted by boy-girl sex.
In recent weeks, United States Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and the National Academy of Sciences have issued resounding calls for plain talk about private topics as a way of limiting the spread of AIDS. Explicit sex education is of prime importance, they said, all the way down to the primary grades.
Koop`s advocacy of sex ed represents a radical departure from the Reagan administration`s usual reticence on the controversial issue, but the surgeon general left little doubt about his feelings.
”Education about AIDS should start in early elementary school and in the home so that children can grow up knowing the behavior to avoid to protect themselves from exposure to the AIDS virus,” Koop wrote in a U.S. Public Health Service brochure.
The National Academy of Sciences echoed that sentiment in strikingly blunt terms, saying that teachers ”must use whatever vernacular is required” to tell how sexually transmitted diseases pass from one person to another.
At Oak Park-River Forest High teachers are doing just that.
In an advanced health class, some juniors and seniors talk about what they didn`t know about AIDS before their teacher, Shara Storandt, spent four days separating fact from fiction.
”I thought AIDS was just for gays,” Brenda Simmons admits.
”I thought I could get AIDS by touching a person who had it,” adds Shwana Thomas. ”And I thought I could get it by eating after them.”
These are not stooges talking; they are among the cream of the crop at a good suburban high school with one of the Chicago area`s best sex ed programs. And yet they, too, clung to myths.
It is probably pie in the sky to infer from the surgeon general`s and the National Academy of Sciences` suggestions that teaching school children about AIDS can rid this country of the disease. But, sex educators say, the subject deserves to be discussed more openly than it is.
”This is not a question of morality,” says the Rev. Craig Darling, a Chicago-based member of the National Council of Churches AIDS Task Force. ”It is a public-health emergency.”
Nevertheless, sex education in public schools remains a great, gray netherworld, a land of innuendo and myth, of heavily censored explanations and impossibly coded messages, of awkward silence and nervous laughter. Although virtually all opinion polls show that Americans approve of sex education by ratios of 3- and 4-to-1 and a 1982 survey of 200 big-city school districts found that 80 percent offered some form of sex education, the subject fits into this nation`s classrooms about as comfortably as a Planned Parenthood convention at the Vatican.
That is because a vocal segment of Americans believe that clinically conveying sexual values and options in school is a mistake. Instead, these people maintain, information about sex needs to be imparted within a wider moral framework provided by families or religions.
”A few people are terrified that sex education will make children promiscuous,” says Susan Levy, an education professor at the Universty of Illinois-Chicago. ”And all it takes is a few people to go and complain loudly. School boards don`t like controversy.”
Consequently, as things now stand, only a handful of school systems nationwide have integrated sex education programs stretching from kindergarten through 12th grade, says sex education consultant Mary Lee Tatum.
”There`s not much significant sex education going on,” says Tatum, who develops sex education programs around the country and teaches family life and sex education in Fairfax, Va. ”The vast majority of courses take place at the high school level and involve little more than show-and-tell with condoms and foam,” she says. ”When the average physical-education teacher teaches about sexually transmitted disease, it`s as if the great gonorrhea sore in the sky sweeps down and goes `WHOMP!` on someone`s body. Our society won`t let us talk seriously about sex.”
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”What is AIDS?” a father asks his 4th grader as they sit in their south suburban home.
”Hmmmm,” the boy says, thinking. ”Oh, something that would help you.” ”That`s what the word `aids` means, but have you ever heard of a disease called AIDS?”
”No, I haven`t.”
”What do you talk about in health class?”
”We learn about where you store food in your body. And we`ve learned what the five senses are.”
”Have you learned anything about how men and women act around each other?”
”No, not yet, and I don`t think I`ll learn that in health class.”
”Why not?”
”Well, it would probably be too embarrassing for the teacher to teach that.”
”Why would that be embarrassing?”
”Maybe the teacher would, you know, have a special feeling about that.” ”What is the `that` that you`re talking about? What is that word you don`t want to say?”
”Sex.”
”What do you know about sex?”
”Hardly anything.”
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Delaying communication only makes it more difficult, says Darling, who works on the national staff of a denomination called the American Baptist Churches in the USA.
”My two sons are 9 and 10,” Darling says. ”They probably know more about AIDS than most adults. They`ve visited people with AIDS and seen videotapes about AIDS several times. It`s given them a positive sense of their sexuality.”
A healthy understanding of sexuality is more than a social luxury, experts argue, it is a psychological necessity. America`s is a fast-paced society, occasionally brutally so. Things happen whether children are ready or not.
”I talked about AIDS last year to my 7th and 8th graders,” says Pam Ughetti, who for a decade has taught sex education in Chicago and its suburbs. ”I told them how it was passed. I used a handout of the male reproductive system so the kids would know what I was talking about. They have to know, because if you`re talking to a girl who is sexually active, she`s probably been having sex with older boys, maybe juniors or seniors. They may ask her to try something different, like anal sex.”
Sol Gordon, director of the Institute of Family Research and Education at Syracuse University, is traveling the U.S. and Canada ”trying to get people who believe in sex education to take action.” He calls America`s current approach to sex ed a ”relentless pursuit of the fallopian tubes” that falls far short of what should be imparted.
”We tell kids, `Just say no,` ” says Gordon, once named the country`s outstanding sex educator by the American Association of Sex Educators and Counselors. ”I asked a group of 17- and 18-year-old high school kids in Texas what abstinence was, and no one knew. Some thought it was like, `Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.`
”Half the people in prison today were born to teenage mothers,” he says. ”That`s sex education: It`s not just telling people how to avoid pregnancy; it`s telling them the consequences.
”We don`t tell kids what they really want to know. For instance, girls want to know if it`s true that once a boy starts (to have intercourse) he can`t stop. We know he can, but as long as boys are playing games, girls might as well get good at playing games, too. So when the boy says, `If you really love me, you`ll do it,` she can say, `I really love you, but do you have a condom?` That`s what sex education should be, and I don`t know of a program that approaches it.”
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”How many of you had sex education in high school?” Susan Levy asks the 70 men and women in her health education class at UIC.
About two-thirds the class members raise their hands.
”How many in elementary school?”
Perhaps a dozen hands rise.
”They showed the girls a film about how babies were born,” says one young women. ”But they wouldn`t let the boys watch it.”
”My teacher had just had a mastectomy,” recalls another student. ”And she had just had an IUD inserted. We broke up into rap sessions and talked about her sex life.”
”In 12 years all I had was one week,” a third woman says. ”The gym teacher gave us words, and we wrote down the definitions. That was all. There was no discussion.”
What impact a full-blown exchange of ideas might have had on this woman or any other student is a matter of debate. Some research shows that sex ed reduces teenage pregnancy, increases the use of contraceptives among sexually active teens and prompts those who haven`t lost their virginity to wait a little longer before doing so. However, one recent study showed that among 15- and 16-year-old girls, those who had taken sex education classes were
”slightly more likely” to begin having sex than those who had not taken classes.
There is not a great body of research on the subject, and most of what there is is inconclusive, says sociologist Douglas Kirby, who in 1984 did a national evaluation of school sex education programs and their effects for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). While sex education communicates useful information, ”no program significantly increased or decreased reported sexual intercourse,” he wrote in his report to the CDC. ”None of the non-clinic programs had a significant impact upon reported use of different methods of birth control.”
”Sometimes you get girls who are pregnant in the 7th and 8th grade, not because they didn`t know about the pill, but because they chose to get pregnant,” says Ughetti, the sex ed teacher. ”One two-week sex education class isn`t going to change that. For some girls, that`s the one thing they can achieve–to have a baby. And when a girl, 13, knows that Mom and Gram and Aunties all had kids at that age, how should she know that it`s not good?”
Sex education alone doesn`t have much impact on behavior, says Kirby, who now directs research for the Center for Population Options in Washington.
”But in combination with contraceptive services it will reduce teenage pregnancy.”
His conclusion was borne out in a three-year study Johns Hopkins University conducted at four inner-city Baltimore schools. The university put counselors into two of the schools and established clinics, which distributed contraceptives nearby. The other two schools had no clinics, but continued to offer Maryland`s state-mandated sex education program.
Pregnancy rates were similar in all four schools when the study started, says Laurie Zabin, who directed the project for Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. But at the end of three years ”there was a vast increase in the methods of birth control employed and a reduction of over 30 percent in pregnancies at the two schools with clinics,” Zabin says. Meanwhile, the pregnancy rates at the schools without clinics rose 58 percent.
The Johns Hopkins program taught students four things about dealing with sexuality: Talk to your parents; talk to professionals; if you`re going to have sex, use protection; if you`re ambivalent, say no.
”We weren`t surprised that if you teach people responsibility, they act responsibly,” Zabin says. ”But we were surprised at the magnitude of the change.”
Nevertheless, placing birth control clinics in or near schools is more emotionally volatile than simply providing information about sex in the classroom. The ongoing furor over the clinic at DuSable High School on Chicago`s South Side testifies to that.
The argument goes beyond the bleak statistics that half of all children born in the city are born out of wedlock and 90 percent of them are born to teenagers. Many critics of sex education in schools feel that because value judgments must necessarily be made, discussions of sex ought to be left in the home or church.
Those discussions better take place early, Darling cautions, because
”people who haven`t dealt with sexual issues with their children from day one have a hard time talking about it later on.”
”How many of your parents talked to you about sex?” Levy asks her class.
Only about 10 hands go up.
”I was 20,” says one woman.
”When I was 16,” says another, ”my mother left contraceptive foam on my dresser. My father came in later and took it away. Nothing was ever said. It didn`t matter. I had been raped when I was 13.”
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On the screen, the actress Rae Dawn Chong rolls her eyes, grins sheepishly and talks about sex and how it can spread AIDS:
”There are two kinds of sex that we`re talking about–intercourse and anal intercourse. During intercourse–that`s your standard guy-girl form of sex– sometimes when you`re making love, you can get a small cut inside and you won`t feel it. If your partner is infected, the virus can enter the bloodstream through the cut. That`s why guys gotta wear condoms and girls gotta make sure guys wear them–to keep infected semen out of the body.
”Now, the other kind of sex. Anal intercourse. This is the riskiest. Why? Because it`s drier and it`s tighter in there, and the blood vessels are closer to the surface and easier to tear. This gives the virus and the semen a direct way to get into the blood.
”The point is, if you`re going to have sexual intercourse of any kind, use a condom.”
The videotape for junior high school students that Chong is narrating is called ”Sex, Drugs and AIDS,” and it seems to be just what the doctors ordered to combat the ever-expanding AIDS epidemic. It is state of the art;
very few similar teaching tools exist.
Still, the video, made by ODN Productions Inc. for students in New York City, is strong stuff, what with its footage of drug addicts sharing needles
(a common way of spreading AIDS) and teenage girls talking about how to get their boyfriends to wear condoms. Consequently, the New York Board of Education, which paid for its production, has balked at showing it in classrooms and as a result it is being revised. Koop`s office, which hasn`t seen the tape, offers a careful disclaimer.
”The kind of sex education that`s appropriate for kids in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant is not appropriate for rural Iowa,” says Michael Samuels, assistant to the surgeon general.
And so, it seems, even a public-health crisis as frightening as AIDS can`t do away entirely with our national squeamishness on the subject.
On Tuesday, when sophomore health classes at Long Island`s Hewlett High School viewed the tape, ”Sex, Drugs and AIDS” finally got its baptism in a public school classroom. Administrators at Hewlett became the first in America to officially place the tape in a sex education curriculum.
”We`re showing it now, and we`ll show it next spring as part of our health course on venereal disease,” says Audrey Sterenfeld, chairman of Hewlett`s science department. And the school will continue to show the videotape in years to come, because, Sterenfeld says, ”as long as AIDS is a health threat, it is appropriate.”
