Sex Education Altered AIDS

A new and dangerous disease was sweeping our nation, being spread by the least talked about subject. Sex and AIDS were weighing on everyones minds, and our kids safety was our concern when, September of 1986 the U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop announced that the country had to change course on sex education.

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In the 80s the taboo topic of sex was just as avoided as it is now. Nobody wanted to talk about it as adults let alone let kids learn about it in schools, but with safety on our mind we realized we needed to alter the way it was taught. The questions of “Is it okay to acknowledge homosexuality?”, “Was it appropriate to talk about sexual acts unrelated to reproduction?” and “What age is the proper age?” plagued everyones minds. We needed to put our shy nature and put on a brave face to protect our kids.

“TIME magazine reported in a 1986 cover story by John Leo:

“There is now no doubt,” said Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in his grim report on AIDS last month, “that we need sex education in schools and that it must include information on heterosexual and homosexual relationships.” With characteristic bluntness, Koop made it clear that he was talking about graphic instruction starting “at the lowest grade possible,” which he later identified as Grade 3. Because of the “deadly health hazard,” he said later, “we have to be as explicit as necessary to get the message across. You can’t talk of the dangers of snake poisoning and not mention snakes.””

Simple and flat out, that is what we needed to be. It was dangerous, killing, and would not get better unless we acknowledged it.

Along with that Time Magazine story was a poll on the american public. During that time “80% of Americans were in favor of public-school sex ed was out of date;[ ]had jumped to 86%.”  A full 95% of respondents to the TIME survey answered that they thought that 12-year-olds should be taught about the dangers of AIDS -- nearly 20 percentage points more than answered yes to the question of whether kids that age should be taught “how men and women have sexual intercourse.””

With this extreme shift in opinions schools began to talk about sex out of marriage and even things as taboo as anal sex. “Harvey Fineberg of Harvard’s School of Public health told the magazine that sex ed had become “a matter of life and death” and, even though not everyone agreed on what exactly should be included in such a class, particularly the question of whether to focus on abstinence, it was getting hard to argue that the topic should be avoided completely.”

Although it took something so deadly and devastating to change our opinions it was for the best. “By the time the magazine revisited the topic in 1993, a whopping 47 states mandated some form of sex ed for students — versus a mere three in 1980 — and every single state supported education about AIDS.” This push took on the change that needed to happen eventually. With changing culture and personal choices on sex have changed so much that the abstinence only, shy, and non informative information priorly available would have killed millions of teens.

ARTICLE: http://time.com/3578597/aids-sex-ed-history/