PETER HITCHENS: After 70 years of sex education, we have proof that it doesn’t work
Who invented sex education? Since we now have so much of it that we can barely escape it, it seems a reasonable question. This is even more important now that we know it does not work.
Last week’s appalling figures for syphilis and gonorrhoea cases – pretty much the worst in modern times – showed beyond doubt that Sex Ed has not prevented the spread of sexual diseases.
The same is true of the huge abortion figures (do you remember when they said legalising that would make it ‘safe, legal and rare’? Not exactly). Without the ever-increasing use of the ‘morning after pill’, which conceals rather than solves the problem, it would be even worse. Meanwhile, family life, as we knew it only a short time ago, is vanishing from large parts of the British landscape.
Instead the state is the main parent. The 1980 prediction by Lady Helen Brook that, ‘From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State to take major decisions – objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child’, has pretty much come true for millions.
I am endlessly amazed that so few people ever pause to wonder why sex education – such a major feature of our schools – receives so little critical attention, especially since it obviously does not work on its own terms. It has always gone hand in hand with a parallel campaign to make contraceptives available, first to the unmarried and then to any child without his or her parents’ knowledge. These policies also failed in their official aim. Is it perhaps possible that its real aim is not the stated aim?
Who invented sex education? Since we now have so much of it that we can barely escape it, it seems a reasonable question
Sex ed has failed to achieve its official targets pretty much since it first began to spread here in the early 1950s. Yet the only response of its advocates is to say that we need more of it, at younger and younger ages, ever more explicit and radical and virtually compulsory at many ages.
Is it possible that it has another intention, one that it has successfully achieved? As far as I can find out, its inventor and pioneer was a Hungarian Communist whose worrying motto was: ‘Who will save us from Western Civilisation?’ This zealot, Georg Lukacs (pronounced ‘Loo Catch’), is still much admired by many on the Left. And he was put in charge of the schools in Budapest during the brief but horrible Hungarian Soviet Republic, which rose and fell there in 1919.
Lukacs became the People’s Commissar for Education and Culture, and he knew exactly what he wanted. Special lectures and specially printed pamphlets were swiftly introduced. Their aim was to ‘instruct’ children about ‘free love’, not to mention ‘the nature of sexual intercourse’. But the classes also preached that traditional Christian family codes of behaviour, especially lifelong marriage, were outdated.
Religion was dismissed as an irrelevant nuisance which deprived mankind of pleasure. Children were urged to reject and deride the authority of their parents and the Church, and to ignore the accepted moral code. Lukacs and the rest of them were gone in months, but his time has now definitely come round again. The revolutionaries who failed so badly to build Utopia a century ago did not give up their aims. They still know they are right, and they are trying again. They just changed their methods.
No more barricades and street fights. Instead they are overturning the ideas that once held Western civilisation together. And they are doing it in a school near you.
Why is Julian Assange still in a maximum security prison? There is no justification for this treatment. We should refuse to extradite him in any case, as the charges are obviously political. But there is no excuse for holding him in such conditions.
Am I supposed to be pleased that my commute is fuelled by recycled cooking oil (see right)? Will the nation’s railway lines, tunnels and stations come to smell of old fish and chips instead of diesel? But if this stuff works, I have an idea – steam engines, fuelled by fatbergs dug from the drains. Picturesque, green and a perfect way of keeping the sewers from blocking up.
The haze we should really fear
When I first saw the haunting pictures of New York City in a orange smoky haze, left, I thought the legalisation of marijuana there had finally got out of hand and the whole metropolis was hopelessly stoned. It turns out just to be woodsmoke from Canada.
I know which sort of smoke worries me more…
A man talks on his phone as he looks through the haze at the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee
One man can bring an end to this wretched war
What is it about war that makes people so unimaginative and thoughtless? As the long-heralded Ukrainian offensive against Russia’s invading troops seems to have begun, I notice that much of the media write rather impersonally about it, as if it is just an event on a map far away. There is no excuse for this.
Large numbers of young men on both sides, scared out of their wits, will be dying horribly, or being terribly wounded in ways which will affect them for the rest of their lives. I looked at archive newspaper reports of the great battle of the Somme in July 1916, likewise intended to repel the German invader from French soil. One account, in The Times of July 3, proclaimed: ‘Everything has gone well, our troops have successfully carried out their missions, all counter-attacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners have been taken.’
The main headline trumpeted ‘Forward in the West’, and the reports said (no doubt truthfully) that there were large numbers of enemy dead. I am not sneering at what these people wrote and what their editors published. Nobody knew, except the soldiers themselves, the ghastly horror of modern warfare when one huge army throws itself at another which has dug into strong defences.
They thought they were still writing about Victorian wars of dashing charges and noble combat. But there is no excuse for any such illusions now. We know the truth. If anyone is in any doubt about the grisly misery of modern war, please read John Harris’s marvellous book Covenant With Death. While they still lived, Harris interviewed surviving veterans of the Somme and turned their memories into a novel of extraordinary power. Nobody who reads it could ever choose to launch or sustain such warfare.
President Biden knows this war will end with negotiations. He said in June 2022: ‘At some point there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here.’ If he wants such talks, he can obtain them, beyond doubt. Ukraine can fight only as long as Washington wants it to.
But a regiment of army-barmy politicians and teenage scribblers, who have never seen a dead body or heard a bullet fly, urge war to the end and the young men are ground into the mud and slime, for the vainglory of others far away.
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