I was educated in the public school system of San Francisco (California) from 1955 to 1968. There was no sex education classes.
(parents parents’ place)
Yes, I can’t remember if it was fifth or sixth grade, but I do remember it was a one-day session on a Friday lasting from the lunch hour until the end of the school day. It was called some boring, innocuous title such as “Family Health Training” or “Life Planning Course”, but of course, all of the students called it sex education. I believe it may have been the first year it was offered, and that in turn, it may have been experimental in nature.
About a week prior to it, we had had to take a permission slip home to get parents to sign for or against our attendance. A sealed booklet marked “For Parents Only” was sent along with the permission slip, it explained which topics would be covered and how the course would be facilitated. That night, I heard my mother and stepfather discussing it in hushed tones, and I was absolutely sure that my mother would be against it, she surprised me completely by giving her consent.
The big to-do between the students for the next week was whose parents had or had not given permission, lots of teasing and making fun of each other took place on both sides of it, immature joking and childish innuendo.
On D-Day, right after lunch, students whose parents had opted out were all gathered in the auditorium and shown a couple of movies for the three hours. For the rest of us, a woman and a man from the Health Department addressed the class, introduced themselves and told us they would be giving the courses. I was surprised, I thought our own teacher would do it. Then they separated us, all the girls in one classroom and all the boys in another. As we broke off into these two groups, more teasing, joking and giggling took place.
Entering the boys’ classroom, there were visual aids, charts, diagrams and two life-sized anatomy displays, one female and one male, but all of these items covered up at first so we didn’t see them until they were presented in turn. Outside of the presence of teachers who knew us, and on the presence of what to us was effectively a substitute teacher, we were wild and boisterous. The man from the Health Dept was by no means a teacher, and his biggest battle was controlling the class of eager yet utterly immature boys to calm down and take it seriously. He started with male puberty, then the differences between the genders, the reproductive systems, intercourse, fertilization, the stages of pregnancy. We found out later that the girls received female puberty, differences between the genders, the reproductive systems, mensuration, intercourse, fertilization, the stages of pregnancy, childbirth/labor, and breastfeeding.
When the course was over three hours later, instead of returning to our classroom, we were released from school to go straight home. That was intentional on the part of the school board and the health department, I guess they considered the course so transformative that we would need to unwind or something. The very first thing that happened as we left the building was the boys grilled the girls on what they had learned and the girls grilled the boys on what we had learned. I remember thinking of it as some sort of rite of passage, the knowledge that had been bestowed on us really changed us from boys and girls to men and women (little did I know how wrong I was).
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rusureamisure? 