By Bud Herron
Guest columnist
When I was a pupil at Hope Elementary School, sex education was taught by a boy in my second-grade class.
(I will just call him “Steve” to protect his identity in the event the Indiana General Assembly passes retroactive legislation outlawing the teaching of “critical sex theory” in public schools and requires him to post his lesson plans online.)
His lesson plans included explicit pictures, meticulously drawn to scale with a No. 2 pencil on the dog-eared yellow pages of his Big Chief Writing Tablet. Five of us eagerly attended his classes during recess, out on the playground, just north of the swings and behind a dumpster.
No girls attended the classes. Likely, they had little interest in Steve’s drawings, which mainly detailed the mysteries of female anatomy — information girls already knew unless they had never taken a bath or changed clothes.
Steve also provided facts on where babies come from, how they got to where they come from and how they get out of where they come from. However, he provided no pictures in this part of his instruction. And, since his major skills were in the visual arts rather than the language arts, his lectures could be confusing.
Sadly — before I could sort out whether my life had begun under a cabbage leaf in my mom’s garden, in a cloth bundle hanging from a stork’s beak or from a seed God planted in mom’s navel — the class was cancelled. The teacher found his lesson plans tucked inside a copy of Life magazine and sent both Steve and his artwork to the principal.
A month or so later, I asked my dad to help me sort out all the incomplete and confusing information I had gathered from Steve’s classes. He told me to go ask my mom.
Mom said when a man and a woman fall in love and decide to “welcome a baby into their home,” they kneel beside their bed and pray and God answers their prayers. Pressed for a more specific answer to “where I came from,” she said I came from the Bartholomew County Hospital — specifically a room on the second floor.
None of these explanations helped much. My parents obviously didn’t know where I came from or were afraid to tell me. The school could have helped, if they had hired Steve to teach an official course — or maybe created a sex education course taught by a teacher who actually had a diploma and a license.
But sex in 1953 was as frightening a subject to a lot of Hoosiers as systemic racism is today. Some people with 15 children refused to discuss openly where their kids came from. Children could be psychologically damaged for life if the truth were known.
The mood of the country said sex talk was best handled in the home rather than at school. So, unless a kid lived on a farm, watched the animals and was smart enough to add one and one and come up with three or more — no human arrivals or departures took place through the birth canal.
The Indiana General Assembly in those days had no reason to write legislation to keep “critical sex theory” out of the schools. Most Indiana schools had no desire to reveal any family secrets. They had enough trouble just tracking down rogue teachers like Steve and sending them home with threatening notes to their parents.
I personally sorted out a lot of the biological details by trial and error in my teen years, and, by the time I married at the age of 23, the confusion had cleared enough for my wife and me to produce two children — the old-fashioned way, without storks or cabbage leaves.
Yet I sometimes worry about some of my classmate friends whose course in sex education out by the dumpster was cut short — making them have to rely on the time-honored information provided by their parents.
I fear somewhere some old couple is still sitting in a cabbage patch longing to start a family and scanning the sky for storks. They would be in their mid-70s by now and a lot of years will have been sadly wasted, just because parents did not believe their children could handle the truth.
Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. Contact him at [email protected].
