Recently I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for the first time. I
was reminded of it the other day when reading about a sex education kit being
handed out to young children in Switzerland.

In Brave New World, the children who are ‘decanted’ in baby factories
are raised by the State, not parents, and from a very early age are encouraged
to ‘explore their sexuality’.

The sex education kit being distributed to primary school children in
Basel includes models of male
and female sex organs.

A teachers’ guide says
that teachers should “show that contacting body parts can be pleasurable”.

It also suggests that they should get pupils to massage each other or to
rub themselves with warm sand bags, all accompanied by soft
music.

In a definite echo of
Brave New World, one of the people who helped develop the programme, said:
“Children should be encouraged to develop and experience their sexuality in a
pleasurable way”.

This, of course, brings
us to the controverted question of when exactly it is appropriate to starting
instructing children about sex and in what way.

At one extreme is the
view that children should be taught nothing about sex until puberty (if then!),
because to do otherwise is an attack on their innocence. But who actually
defends such a viewpoint nowadays?

Close to the other
extreme appears to be view espoused by those behind the Swiss programme, which
is that children should be encouraged to explore their sexuality as early as
possible.

(I say close to the
opposite extreme, because it is possible to get even more extreme as this
article
from Der Spiegel on attempt to ‘sexually liberate’ children shows).

The vast majority of
people are, of course, somewhere between these two extremes. They want their
children to be given the basic biological facts of life as they approach puberty
and after that any sensible parent wants their children to be taught, at a minimum, that sex
must take place within a committed relationship, and after the teenage years
have passed.

Committed Christians
obviously want their children to be taught that sex belongs within marriage, but
how often they get taught this, even in denominational schools, is hard to
say.

Another question is, of
course, whether this job belongs primarily to parents or to schools. The right
answer is parents, although schools can supplement – so long as they really do supplement rather than undermine- what the parents are trying to do at
home.

We worry a lot today
about the sexualisation of children even though we seem to do little to counter
it. For example, do we really protest against music aimed at kids that most
assuredly sexualises them?

What would that Swiss
sex ed programme achieve if it was introduced here? I think it’s fair to say it
would hasten their sexualisation. Hopefully parents here would object to it as
they did in their thousands in Switzerland. Or perhaps our media would nullify
such resistance by condemning the protestors as reactionaries and the programme
itself as enlightened, progressive and emblematic of a Brave New World.