The end of innocence.

Teaching Sex
The Shaping of Adolescence
in the Twentieth Century
Jeffrey P. Moran
Harvard University Press, $27.95, 288 pp.

The ferocious battle over sex education has died down in the past few years, as the sense of crisis over teen pregnancy has diminished. The unwed- teen birth rate has dropped steadily for nine straight years. So has the rate of abortion. And the percentage of teenagers who are sexually experienced has declined modestly, more for teenage boys than for girls. Still, as Jeffrey Moran demonstrates, sex education has ignited controversy ever since it began early in the twentieth century and is likely to continue to do so.

Happily, Moran does not take sides in this debate. Instead, he patiently and methodically traces the steady advance of sex education from early and modest efforts to prevent the spread of venereal disease among military recruits to more ambitious, broadly reformist efforts to improve the morals, health, and future family lives of teenagers. His scrupulously fair-minded account ends with this bombshell conclusion: sex education has been a bust, pretty much from beginning to end. And that's not all. Moran casts doubt on the very idea that education can reform sexual behavior.

Moran begins his story at the beginning of the twentieth century with the "discovery" of adolescence by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall. Borrowing heavily from Victorian ideas of youthful sexuality and character formation, as well as evolutionary theory, Hall portrayed the central drama of adolescence as the struggle to subdue and redirect unruly sexual energies into the formation of a sturdy moral character. This struggle required both individual self-control and a socially supported moratorium on youthful sexuality. This concept captured the imagination of Progressive reformers who were alarmed over mounting evidence that young people were falling victim to the temptations of secular urban life. With Hall's theory, Progressives found a scientific rationale for their reform efforts. Instead of preaching morality, they could teach young people how to manage their sexual desires and preserve their innocence.

Throughout the century, Moran explains, sex education oscillated between medicine and morality. When anxieties about sexual diseases predominated, as in wartime or with the advent of hiv/aids, the emphasis was the dangers of disease and the medical facts of disease prevention. When concerns about a breakdown of morality prevailed, as they did with the increase in unwed-teen pregnancy, - the emphasis shifted to chastity, abstinence, and self-control. Frequently, medicine and morals came together in an uneasy and ultimately unstable synthesis. For example, today's sex education blends a strong emphasis on abstinence with plain talk about the dangers of hiv/aids and the measures required to protect against this sexually transmitted disease.

Mainly, however, sex educators stuck to conventional morality. Despite periodic protests from parents and religious conservatives, they devoted themselves to promoting premarital chastity and the pleasures of married sex. Over time, even as they expanded their mission to incorporate dating, courtship, marriage, and marital relationships, sex educators continued to preach the virtues of waiting for sex until marriage.

Moran sees the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s as the watershed event in the history of sex education. The sexual revolution unleashed ideas, energies, and forces that threatened the entire sex-education project. For a time, some sex educators tried to accommodate the liberationist spirit of the times. They replaced the old moral vocabulary with the language of choice. More important, sex educators shifted the responsibility for sexual control from adults and the social world to teens and their inner world. Sex educators no longer saw their role as protecting the innocence of the young. Instead, they assumed that teenage sexuality was healthy, normal, and a matter of individual choice. Their duty was to promote a dialogue with students and to help them make responsible decisions. But in the long run, even the most morally neutral sex educator could not contend with the amoral sex-is-fun culture created by Madison Avenue and Hollywood.

More to the point, the sex revolution challenged the very idea of adolescence. Here Moran brings his story full circle, back to the early decades of the twentieth century. Sex educators saw themselves as part of the larger professionalized reform movement to protect and guide young people through the increasingly perilous passage between childhood and adulthood. They cast themselves as the guardians of youthful innocence. But as the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood began to collapse, as adult supervision and authority eroded and fragmented, as adult sexual images and messages became more broadly diffused throughout the culture by the popular media, as adults became more adolescent and adolescents became more like adults, the entire rationale for sex education began to crumble.

Today, Moran says, the twentieth-century concept of adolescence no longer faithfully describes the real-life experience of most teenagers. Post-sex revolution, the boundaries separating teenagers from adults are increasingly difficult to draw, even more to enforce and sustain. Indeed, though Moran only hints at this, we may be witnessing the formation of something entirely new in human history: an autonomous teenage world, operating according to its own rules and assumptions, claiming the same sexual freedoms, rights, and privacy as adults, and recruiting parents as friends, confidantes, and helpmates in its sexual pursuits.

Moran doesn't advocate tossing sex education out of the schools, but he believes it must change its focus and direction. He would like to see sex education integrated into a broader effort to train youthful imagination, taste, and judgment. In short, he would like to move sex education from health and P.E. into English and history classes. I think he is onto something important here. Today's sexually liberated teenagers are more confused than ever before about how to sustain relationships of mutual affection and respect, how to find a worthy person to marry, and how to protect themselves, not only against disease, but against the cruelty, deception, and repeated heartbreaks that seem to accompany the youthful sex-is-fun culture. Though Moran doesn't say so explicitly, I think he is suggesting that sex education might more usefully devote itself to the big and neglected topic of love.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is the author of The Divorce Culture (Alfred A. Knopf).