Oh no. If the country wasn't facing enough problems, what with the recession and George Osborne's colourful holidays with Peter Mandelson, the government has chosen today to reform sex education for the tiny tots. It's surely on a hiding to nothing there, I'd wager.
Before schools minister Jim Knight unveiled today's details of what he and his capo Ed Balls have in mind, he had already hinted - last week - that a review his department set up had received "strong recommendations" for making sex education compulsory in all schools. But it must be done without "sexualising young people too early", the minister emphasised.
In a society as sexualised as ours that's going to be pretty difficult. Ever vigilant, I spotted we were getting confused years ago when Pirelli introduced that calendar with models posing on it in a supposedly sexy way. Car tyres? Car tyres and sex? Sex used to sell car tyres? Had I missed something during the primitive version of sex ed taught in my Cornish grammar school?
Anyway, it's got a lot worse than Pirelli. Sexuality, and what passes for it, seems to have seeped into all corners of our lives, together with anxiety about sexuality. Am I too fat? Unlovable? Not sexually active enough for a woman of 83 (or 12)? And why is little Amy sitting on Uncle Arthur's knee eating sweeties?
So what should governments do about it? It's certainly not Gordon Brown's job to give us the basic facts of life in a nightly ministerial broadcast, entertainingly oblique though the Broon version might be ("Not too much boom and bust children, it may distract you from your studies").
But clearly, in this age of anxiety, the teaching profession requires guidance. When so many parents are irresponsible, neurotic, busy, overprotective, angry, negligent, it must be a minefield for every head and staff.
As things stand current rules provide that schoolchildren must be taught the biological facts of reproduction. This usually happens in science classes - in those new-fangled biology classes we had back in 1960, as I recall. Our teacher, Miss Bland, was prone to blushing (so was I) and it was painful. "My last job was in pest control. It was easier," I still recall her saying.
But just as every school must have a sex-education policy, there is no statutory requirement for teaching about relationships and the social and emotional side of sexual behaviour. This is the bit Knight hopes to change.
There's also a separate report out suggesting better education on drugs and drink. But let's stick to sex and seven-year-olds. As I understand it, they will be told the birds and bees stuff, but not told the rude mechanics of sexual intercourse - which always sounds gross, threatening or screamingly funny ("You do what with it?") to anyone not actively engaged in the deed.
Kids will only get the details at 11-plus, though girls will be told about periods before they get them - often at 10 nowadays, I'm told. That sounds fair enough. It used to come as a terrible shock to girls not prepared for it, well into my lifetime.
Needless to say, partisans on both sides have already been touring the broadcast studios explaining:
(a) why international studies suggest that such an informative approach is helpful to young people, especially before puberty.
(b) why premature sexualisation of children, the "safe sex" doctrine etc have a pretty bad record in Britain, which is still EU champion in the teen pregnancy and sexually-transmitted disease stakes.
Needless to say again, both sides have a point. Stories of young girls bullied into it by boys, but thinking they can avoid getting pregnant via all the old wives' tales (young wives too) are heart-breaking. But so are the 10-year-old Lolitas one cannot help but spot in any of our city centres dressed up as if they were on the game.
The media message that sex is the answer to whatever the question is ("What brand of tyre should Daddy buy?") reinforces society's complicity in this pernicious stuff on countless magazine covers, billboards and TV shows. I swear it, even the gardening programmes show a bit of ankle nowadays. Is nothing sacred, not even next spring's daffs?
Having watched my own children and their friends grow up, my own impression is that it's best to install the basics when they're still too young to be very interested, let alone embarrassed. As I recall, Mrs White, who is terrific at this sort of thing, had an illustrated book in which a bearded Dane tackled Mrs Dane in a rather earnest way. It caused much merriment.
The trouble is that most kids know at least as much as the teachers by the time they're 12, or think they do. In some cases (Miss Bland?) they're probably right, in others, the ones that reach court, it turns out that teacher has been giving free lessons after school. Sheer self-sacrifice!
But Knight is surely right to stress relationships and, I hope, to emphasise mutual respect, the key to it all at 12 or 112. When I was still bookish and virginal, dimly aware it was the 60s, but hopeless at doing anything about it, I clocked a line of Iris Murdoch's that "the essence of love is the toleration of difference". It holds up better than the Pirelli calendar of the same year.
My first real girlfriend's next boyfriend got her pregnant, so I heard, enviously - though it was a narrow escape. As parents we later found ourselves more permissive than either of us expected about all the usual stuff. It worked out more or less all right, but these matters are always a mixture of luck and judgment.
It's hard to avoid the very obvious conclusion: a good example at home is the safest way to inculcate better habits into children; school, which so often gets the blame, can only do so much to correct family failings.
So good luck, Jim Knight, but don't expect any gratitude.
