The World’s Problem With Sex Ed - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/09/opinion/the-worlds-problem-with-sex-ed.html?emc=edit_th_20150309&nl=todaysheadlines
Enthusiasts of globalization often confuse it with liberalization. As people and ideas move around the world, the argument goes, ideals of individual liberty will replace the strictures of inherited tradition.
The story of sex ed suggests otherwise. Globalization has served to curtail rather than expand school-based sexual instruction. The more the world has become interconnected, the more sex ed has come under attack.
Sex ed in the United States dates from the Progressive Era, when groups like the American Social Hygiene Association promoted education as a route to eradicating venereal disease and prostitution. (John D. Rockefeller Jr. was a strong proponent.) Practices across the world varied widely; the early Soviet Union embraced relatively libertine sex ed, viewing traditional propriety as a form of bourgeois pretension, but in Mexico, the Roman Catholic Church led efforts to block nearly all attempts to teach human sexuality in the schools.
What’s distinctive in the last three decades is that immigrants have joined with native-born conservatives across the West to restrict these public-health teachings. As early as 1983, white conservatives in New Zealand warned that sex ed would alienate Maori populations as well as Asian immigrants.