Sex education began in the United States about a century ago to control venereal disease and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. The more that people and ideas move across borders, indeed, the more contested – and the more constrained – sex education has become. The exchange underscored a fundamental division over sex education, which has become a source of new tensions in our so-called age of globalisation. And a frank, factual sex education was the best route to that. His organisation’s main goal was to help each individual experience sex “as a positive factor” in her or his life.
“The fundamental reason for sex education – according to the Swedish view – is the right to knowledge, not ideas about special effects,” Boethius wrote. Boethius kindly replied that those rates were indeed lower in Sweden than in most parts of the West, including Ireland, but that Swedes “do not know if these positive figures are partly due to sex education”.īesides, Boethius added, that wasn’t the point.
In 1978, an Irish educator asked Swedish Association for Sexuality Education chairman Carl Boethius how school-based sex education in his country had affected venereal disease and teen-pregnancy rates.
