Sex education is to be compulsory for children from the age of five … but no, no, no, splutters the schools minister Jim Knight within hours of making the announcement, of course he is not suggesting that children as young as five and six should be taught about sex.
Well, I am. Why not tell five- and six-year-olds about sex? Why not tell one- and two-year-olds, if they ask? Why keep information about sex from any child who wants to know how babies are made, and where they come from?
Keeping quiet about sex makes no sense whatsoever to me. My four daughters have always known all about sex, in the sense that there was never a time when I wouldn't answer their questions, or precipitate discussion if the time seemed right, about sex, relationships, birth and babies. Being open and honest has always seemed entirely the right policy, and I simply can't understand what parents feel they are "shielding" their children from. Issues around sex, surely, are to do with emotional stuff: what on earth can be wrong with giving your child the tools for understanding the physical facts about sexuality? After all, we fall over ourselves as parents to educate our children in every other direction – we want them reading Shakespeare at three and playing Mozart on the piano at five, so it seems a bit strange that these same pushy, educationally focused parents want to limit their kids' knowledge on a subject as fundamental as sex.
The problem in the UK – neatly demonstrated, in fact, by Knight – is that we're afraid. Afraid not just of sex education, but of sex per se. It's not that we're messing up in the way we educate our kids on sex so much as that we're messed up in so many ways as a nation about it: so of course we're unable to pass information on to our kids about it in a healthy, responsible, useful way.
Instead we grapple around, clutching at straws and sending endless delegations to Holland in fruitless attempts to understand the (to some) perplexing link between its enlightened approach to sex education, and the fact that its teenage pregnancy rate is the lowest in western Europe, six times lower than in the UK. What we fail to realise is that observing Dutch sex education lessons will get us nowhere, interesting though they are. In fact, formal sex education is relatively new in the Netherlands: the secret there is entirely to do with the way sex is discussed in the home, between parents and their children, and far less to do with the way it's tackled in the classroom.
We need to think far less about formal sex education, whether in Holland or in the UK, and far more about how we think of sex generally. We need to stop seeing sex merely as a "danger" a "risk" or a "problem" – because that's how it's seen now, in countless homes across Britain, and that's the message we're getting over to our kids. We need to separate educating our children about physiology from educating them about emotions (the first we can give them relatively easily while they're quite young; the second, we will spend a lifetime working with them on). We need to realise that covering up our fears is getting us nowhere. And most of all, we need to realise that being open is not the same as being permissive, because the two, in fact, are completely different.
