Seminal Moments

On Wednesday morning, I gave a talk on how to be a journalist to a class of 11-year-olds in a school in middle England. Some pupils seemed white-faced and dazed. This was not because of a blow-by-blow account of the methods of Alastair Campbell but because, in the previous lesson, they'd received their key stage 2 sex education.

But the publication yesterday of a report from a government advisory group - suggesting sex education for pupils as young as five - raises the possibility that, in a few years' time, a similar class might find the subject of journalism rather more interesting than boring old shagging. The proposals have been exaggerated by media puritans - the suggestion involves discussing babies when a pupil gains an infant sibling - but it revives the question: what should children know and when should they know it?

My own sexual education began in 1973 - between that Philip Larkin poem and John Lennon's last LP - at a nun-run school in Hertfordshire. The lesson was interrupted three times: twice by pupils fainting at the news and once for the expulsion of a boy who suggested that the elderly nun and the venerable "lay teacher" (as they were called on all occasions, not just this one) should give a demonstration.

Regrettably, the well-meaning nun had at some time in her life equated wet dreams with menstruation and so advised the boys that they should expect a nocturnal emission once every 28 days. This led to unsettling times during the seminal frenzy of adolescence, when some of us were suffering the curse almost nightly.

But those were days of innocence - even after you'd been told where babies came from - and now, in a general culture wet with sex, there must be fewer and fewer pupils for whom the facts are genuinely a newsflash.

The national curriculum - moving on from chicks and puppies in key stage 1 to the full human nitty-gritty by key stage 2 - already amounts to a statutory exclusion of the kind of euphemisms on which homes and schools survived for years, in which daddy "passes a seed" to mummy with "a special kiss". At my infant school, a decorous decision not to mention either erection or vaginal lubrication made intercourse sound like a puzzling torture.

So the facts should be as full and clear as possible. An English teacher who omitted nouns on personal grounds or a maths teacher who missed out addition in case it created spendthrifts would soon be sacked. Human biology, when taught to pupils with the potential for menstruation and ejaculation, should not be the one area of the syllabus in which withholding information is encouraged.

The fear, especially of the conservative and the religious, is that information will encourage promiscuity. But the educational system provides all the information necessary for literacy and numeracy, and yet many children restrain themselves from putting them into action. The conservative objection to this is that sex is more fun than algebra or spelling, but the point is that an obsession with sex education puts the emphasis in the wrong place.

Parents embarrassed to discuss reproduction tell themselves that revelation will come on the playground. In my case, the best sexual mentor was the arts. I learned about the importance of squeezing the air from the teat of the condom through a television play in which failure to do so led to a wedding scene. The American novel - Roth and Updike in particular - taught the circuitry and importance of the female orgasm. Anyone who goes into the bedroom tutored purely through the classroom is in for misery and failure there.

A successful sex life is a result of many things: crucially, who your partner is but, no less importantly, who your parents and friends were, what you've read and seen, and the people you were lucky enough to meet or to avoid. I'd be surprised if many people's adult sexuality had much to do with their schooling, with the single and terrible exception of those who come under the influence of pederasts. The obsession over what respectable pedagogues say on the subject is simply a displacement of other arguments over society and religion.

The best model is road safety lessons. Children are told that traffic is dangerous and can ruin your life, and yet a happy life will need access to both sides of the street. If they ever need to cross a three-lane highway, they will know how to do it safely. So it should be with sex. But teachers aren't responsible for killed pedestrians, and bonking isn't all their fault either.