As someone who works in the sexuality education space, I hear a lot of misinformation about what sex ed supposedly includes and/or does.
One person spreading this misinformation is Candace Owens. Here is a video of her declaring her reasons for not supporting sex ed in schools. She makes several claims about the sexual activity of high schools students and the history of sex ed in America without citing any sources. As such, I'd like to unpack some of her talking points.
"Thomas Sowell wrote a book called Inside the Education System, and he spends a chapter talking about sex ed, which didn't exist before the 1970s in schools. And the pitch was, "Well, the kids are having sex anyway, so we should just teach sex education so that they practice safe sex." And that was a complete myth and a lie."
Owens is referencing Thomas Sowell’s book, Inside American Education, which in turn is referring to the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970. But it’s simply inaccurate to say sex ed didn’t exist in schools before the 1970s, because it very well did. For example, the Chamberlain-Kahn Act of 1918 implemented a public health program to combat the spread of venereal disease, what we now call sexually transmitted infections. The Act saw the federal government and the United States Public Health Service fund and support sex education programs.
In fact, the U.S. Public Health Service sponsored two surveys on the status of sex education in 1920 and 1927, discovering in each year that 40 and 45 percent, respectively, of the responding senior high schools offered their students some form of sex education, which included “social aspects” of sex, such as prostitution and venereal disease in 1920, but which had broadened by 1927 to include “the value of monogamy, guidance of emotions and impulses, sex attraction,” and “boy-girl relationships."
I'll skip a few decades here but the so-called pitch for sex education in the 1970s wasn't "well, the kids are having sex anyway." In fact, sex ed in American high schools was replaced by family life education during the 1940s and 50s, which actually sanitised education about sex. Reproduction was still taught, but with the changing social mores of the 1960s, the American public was increasingly concerned about teenagers’ attitudes towards sex. So, there was a push by the public for schools to reintroduce sex education and make it relevant based on the societal changes. So much so that a Gallup poll in 1969 showed that 71% of Americans supported public school sex education (Scales, 1981).
"The majority of students were graduating with their virginity intact in the 1960s. After they placed in sex ed, and they sort of started telling children, "Oh, everybody's doing it," kids started just doing it. And now the majority of kids graduate school without their virginity."
While national survey data on age of intercourse were not collected until 1971 (Brooks-Gunn & Furstenberg, 1989), it does appear to be true that the majority of high school students weren’t sexually active before then. For example, Estimates from selected samples prior to then are that, by 1971 one third of never-married White girls 16 years of age had had intercourse and that one third to two thirds of male teenagers were sexually active (Hofferth & Hayes, 1987; Zelnik & Kantner, 1977). One retrospective study found that 24% of teenagers in 1950 said they'd had sex in high school (Bajracharya, Sarvela, & Isbemer, 1995) and later data from the National Survey of Family Growth showed that 26% of the cohort who turned 15 from 1954 to 1963 had had premarital sex by age 18 (Finer, 2007).
Sexual activity did appear to increase among high school students during 1970s (Zelnik & Kantner, 1980) - although this is contested (Cutright, 1962) - but considering that only 35% of private and public schools provided sex education by the late 1970s, which also varied widely in terms of content due to local community standards (Scales, 1981), it is disingenuous to say that this increase in teen sexual activity was caused by sex education.
Also, the majority of kids today do not graduate high school without their virginity. In fact, according to findings from the National Survey of Family Growth (2017), since the first edition published in 1991 of the Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education, the curriculum the current system is based on, there has actually been a “consistent, durable decline in teen sexual activity,” By 2021, the number of high school students who reported ever having sex had fallen to 30% (Youth Risk Behaviour Survey, 2019).
And not to put too fine a point on it, but the Adolescent Family Life Act, which provided funding for abstinence-only programs, was signed into law in 1981, yet the 1980s actually saw an increase in sexual activity among American high schools students (Bigler, 1989).
"The point, and why a lot of these programs were funded by Planned Parenthood, was to sexualize children. That's what they wanted. Kids start having sex. There's money to be made. Kids are buying condoms. There's money to be made with the textbooks that they're giving to school. And so I believe that sex education should not be taught at school."
Considering that up until a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1977 which deemed it unconstitutional (Carey v. Population Services International, 431 U.S. 678), it was illegal for minors under the age of 16 to purchase condoms, I doubt there was a lot of money to be made from kids buying condoms.
As for making money from textbooks, yeah, that’s the system we live in. Publishing Companies make money selling text books. This seems like an odd thing for a staunch free market capitalist to be upset about. What about the publishers selling math, science, and literature textbooks to schools? Where's Owens' outrage about that?
Sex education doesn’t sexualise students. And even if many high schoolers aren’t sexual active, the vast majority of them will be at some point in their life. Less than half of eligible American teenagers vote and yet high schools all across the country teach civics because the understanding is that the information is important for these students to become informed citizens. The same is true for sex ed as these young people become responsible sexual citizens.