Sex, drugs and the honour roll: the perennial challenges of addressing moral purity issues in schools

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in North America, public health and social reform advocates were quick to identify and exploit the nascent modern institution of public schools as opportune spaces in which to advance their progressive projects. In particular, psychoactive substance use (at first primarily alcohol drinking) and sexuality were regarded as two domains of morally-charged social activity in which desired attitudinal and behavioural outcomes could be achieved through school-based education. Since the advent of these early public health or ‘social hygiene’ efforts in schools, political responses and modern Western cultural norms about both drugs and sexuality have undergone significant transformation over the course of the twentieth century. At the same time, research on purported health or social risks of substance use and sexual activity – and their prevention and mitigation among young people – has burgeoned as a field of professional practice and academic inquiry. This article undertakes a brief comparative review of historical and contemporary approaches to school-based sexuality and drug education in North America. In so doing, it also explores how scientific knowledge about the topics of sex and drugs, and the corollary project of school-based ‘prevention’ in these domains, has been shaped by evolving ideological and cultural forces. It concludes that the issues of sexuality and drug use – still steeped in conceptions of moral purity and pollution – are likely to remain strongly contested terrain for school-based education.

Keywords:

• sex education
• drug education
• prevention
• school
• public health
• history
• youth
• sexuality
• substance abuse

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Andrea Langlois and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a working draft of this manuscript.

Notes

1. While both sexual and substance use behaviours may take overtly public forms, and broader public discourses function to frame the meanings that individual subjects bring to and take from such activities, the phenomenology of these experiences and the desires or pleasures/pains they generate is, in significant respects, quintessentially private. However, it is important also to acknowledge that ‘distinctions between the public and private are often impossible to sustain when secular formations [e.g. sexuality education] are placed under detailed scrutiny’ (Rasmussen 2012, 473).

2. The 1913 ‘Chicago Experiment’ – undertaken by Ella Flagg Young, the superintendent of Chicago schools and a graduate student of John Dewey’s – was the first instance of a wide-scale sexual hygiene course offered in public schools in the USA (Jensen 2010).

3. ‘Comprehensive’ sex education refers to instruction about sexual matters that includes discussion of birth control to prevent pregnancy, and condoms or other prophylactic means to prevent disease transmission; it is typically contrasted with abstinence-only sex education, which disregards or discredits such harm reduction approaches. By analogy, comprehensive drug education would include explicit harm reduction approaches and provide health promotion education for those students who do not abstain.

4. A classic example of simplistic media-based drug ‘education’ is the Partnership for a Drug-Free America’s now infamous ‘This is your brain on drugs’ television commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub_a2t0ZfTs.

5. Although the word ‘slut’ (like the word ‘queer’) has been subject to a process of social or political re-signification in certain subaltern discourses recently (Ringrose and Renold 2012), its primary connotation in broader public discourse remains one that perpetuates a gender-based double standard and disparagingly links ‘sex, women, service, class, dirt and pollution’ (Attwood 2007, 234).

6. In a curiously reflexive twist, the field of public health has drawn from discourses of pharmacology, toxicology and immunology terms such as ‘dose’ and ‘booster’ to represent the amount of exposure to prevention or health promotion interventions such as drug education classes (see Whitelaw 2012).

7. Alternatives to the abstinence-oriented sex and drug education programmes of the past have emerged in recent years, led by educators who have come out of queer culture, the sex-positive movement, resilience education and harm reduction movement. However, programmes based in these philosophies have yet to make significant inroads in many public school classrooms, and where they do exist are typically more available to so-called ‘at-risk’ youth through drop-in centres and alternative schools.