Years ago, I was teaching a class in their early teens part of a module on relationships and sexuality. I had just finished delivering with reasonable competence the central facts of sexual intercourse. I stopped, reflected for a second and said: "I realise that given the way I have described it, there would be no good reason for anyone to ever have sex". The pupils laughed.
We proceeded, then, to fill the blackboard with the reasons that they supplied as to why people have sex. Love, bonding, commitment and having babies figured strongly, but pleasure and desire got honourable mention, too. I thought no more about it until a parent-teacher meeting some weeks later.
A parent who knew me quite well said to me, her eyes alive with mischief, that she thought I might like to know the degree of success I was having in sex education. Sally (not her real name) had come home from school and announced at the dinner table, that Miss O'Brien had told them that there was no good reason for anyone to ever have sex.
I looked at the mother in horror, and started to stammer an explanation of the context in which I had said it. She told me to relax, that she knew very well that her daughter was still a little girl both physically and mentally, and thought that the whole idea was yucky despite having had chats with her mother. In other words, because of her developmental stage, she had stopped listening once she heard something that she wanted to hear, even though it had been said as a joke.
I think about that incident every time someone calls for more sex education in schools. It happened again this week, in the wake of publication of research commissioned by the Department of Education and Science. Certainly we could do with more and better sex education, but let us have no illusions. It is no panacea.
Firstly, as the dinner-time announcement illustrates, sex education in a class of 30 is very much a hit and miss affair. Some are already living lives so colourful that their parents would suffer cardiac arrest if they knew the half of it, and some are so innocent that you had forgotten they still made children like that. You hope that they will talk to parents, and encourage them to, but you know some of them won't.
The incident also shows that parents know their children best, but that even when parents are open and loving, children find it hard to speak about such intimate topics. How much more difficult, then, is it to open up in school, given the sheer adolescent terror of making an eejit of yourself in front of friends. Not to mention the fact that you might have to look at your teacher for the next five years.
Even when it is well done, sex education in school is a poor second to parental sex education and, at best, is only a supplement to it. Our children live in a sex-saturated culture, where they receive education about sex on an hourly basis, and some of it is incredibly negative.
For example, what did young men learn about rape from the suspended sentence of three years handed down last week? Oh, so you are generally a nice lad, but on this occasion you were out of your head on drink and drugs?
Well, that's all right then, you can catch the same train home as your victim. The judge in the case may not have thought of it like that, but it was sex education at its most powerful, and the ones who will have learnt the lesson best are girls. They will think twice about reporting a case of sexual assault, no matter how horrendous.
It is no surprise that the research shows that some boys receive little or no sex education in school.
Traditionally, because girls menstruate and can become pregnant, there has always been an urgency about giving them the basic facts. Boys, whose physical development causes them at least equal amounts of self-doubt and distress as girls, are often left to fend for themselves.
We have also become very timid about setting high standards regarding sex. Yet at least 95 per cent of young people see themselves as being in a permanent relationship at some stage, which for most of them is still synonymous with marriage.
Why, then, at Senior Cycle, do we not talk about relationships, sexuality and marriage education? It is possible to do that without ostracising or alienating young people who do not come from married families, simply by framing it as a course in how to maximise the chances of a happy marriage or long-term committed relationship. Given that the majority of young people still aspire to long-term, married relationships, there is a great deal of interest in how to develop the skills to improve the chances of achieving that goal.
There is no need for a heavy-handed, finger-wagging approach. Respecting young people's intelligence, and giving them good sources of information, allows them to process the information themselves. For example, the research on living together speaks for itself. It is counter-intuitive, but the research indicates that cohabitation decreases the chances of having a happy marriage, and serial cohabitation is the most damaging. This is news to most young people, but it usually takes them all of 10 minutes to figure out for themselves the reasons why. Will it change their views?
Will it change their actions? Probably not. As the report says, "school-based relationships and sexuality education alone is unlikely to change behaviour, given the complex and multifaceted nature of sexuality". So what is the point? At least an approach like this does not acquiesce in the kind of shoulder-shrugging helplessness that afflicts a lot of adults, and if the young people are lucky enough to have good support and open communication at home, it may reinforce a positive message.
Every time society feels wobbly about some aspect of young people's lives, the knee-jerk reaction is to expect the schools to sort it out, whether the issue be alcohol abuse, obesity or education in sexuality. Yet without a concerted message from the adult world, and especially the most important adults, parents, schools are doomed to failure.