The World Has Changed:
We Can’t Move Backwards
The impact of the 1980’s global AIDS pandemic had a truly lasting effect on sexuality education in the United States. Lily Rothman, writer for TIME and author of the 2014 article “How AIDS Changed the History of Sex Education” explores this tragic epidemic and follows the people who helped change our world for the better. Rothman writes:
It was September of 1986 when U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop announced that the country had to change course on sex education. By then, however, the change had already begun.
People were starting to question whether or not to include homosexuality and non-reproductive sex in the curriculum and at what age to introduce them. Rothman states, “Those questions could have been debated indefinitely; the metaphor of a pendulum is often used to describe changing attitudes toward sexual mores and education” — back and forth with the changing times. However, even the American public was not ready for what U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop had to say — he knew he had to do the right thing.
Until something came along that made those questions seem less important than ever: AIDS. In the 1980s, even before Koop spoke out, fear of the then-mysterious disease gave parents, educators, politicians and students a reason to put aside their sqeamishness — and thus changed the history of sex ed forever.
Rothman uses another TIME cover story from 1986 where reporter John Leo quoted Surgeon General Koop discussing the then policy initiatives he wanted to enact. Dr. Koop endorsed teaching information on both “heterosexual and homosexual relationships” in the classroom starting as early as age 3. Dr. Koop knew the stakes were too high for a timid response to the AIDS crisis and he defended his convictions:
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.”
Dr. Koop is right, but it’s horrible that it took the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives to convey the need for more sex education. But often times tragedy moves the pendulum back towards progress. AIDS provided a starting point for change and the country responded to the Surgeon General’s call. Rothman states:
“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.”
But even with updated information on AIDS in sex education in the U.S., the CDC still reports increased prevalence or contraction of the disease. Rothman writes:
As of 2002, TIME reported that “a quarter of all new HIV cases today occur in those ages 21 and younger” — and, as of 2010, that figure hadn’t changed much, with the CDC reporting that 26% of new infections were in people between the ages of 13 and 24.
Given the statistics, there is still a lot of work to be done to protect our youth from AIDS. This pandemic should be remembered, not repeated. If we don’t get serious about sex education now, we could end up right back in the 1980’s. Yet Rothman finds a disturbing trend happening at the state level —
“Today, fewer than half as many states as did 20 years ago require that public-school students get sex ed in the classroom…”
“…The pendulum, it appears, continues to swing.”