Brother Armin and the Sex Education Conundrum

The new Department of Education Secretary, Brother Armin Luistro barely warmed his office chair when the question of sex education being taught in public school was brought up by the press. As a Christian Brother, would he toe the Catholic Church line and get rid of it or would he be mindful of church/state separation and continue, if not expand its curriculum?

I thought of my school days (this was in the sixties) in La Salle Green Hills, a Christian Brother school. I asked old classmates if they recalled having gotten any sex education classes.

There was none. We got everything else, a demanding academic program, a host of dedicated teachers, Christian values, a social conscience and grooming for leadership. But in the area that baffled young men trying to understand their bodies, their sexuality, and that of the female sex, we were on our own.

We learned about sex furtively, through sources not necessarily reliable nor authoritative nor respectful of the body beautiful.

The family drivers with macho raunchy tales. The porn mags with naked pained women being sexually manhandled. James Bond having sex with busty women between shootouts as seduction lessons. The library was no help. If there was one dusty medical book on the subject, the terms spermatozoa and ovaries with their clinical illustrations made it all so boring. Even older brothers and relatives were useless. Having had no education on the matter or on the instructing, old-wives tales like masturbation causing blindness would be the admonition. By the time we reached high school, with testosterones on overdrive, our understanding of sex was warped and fraught with hurt.

There were a few brave parents who didn’t want to see their son bring home a pregnant girl or get the clap and bravely initiated a serious talk. To share with their sons the enchantment of physical intimacy would have asked too much from them. In school, if you didn’t point-blank grill the guidance counselor or a hapless teacher, the subject of sex was left to be perplexed. We were the sixties Ken and GI Joe dolls with no penises.

The first mixed dances we attended were awkward scenes, many of us abysmally clueless and infantile on what to say or how to assess and act on the sexual tingling inside us.

If we actually managed to have sex furtively or commercially, it was largely followed by feelings of guilt, fears of catching a disease, or the false bravado of scoring. In our ignorance, sex was, by default, cast as “dirty” and “sinful” leaving no room for the wonders, the pleasure and the affirmation of life that it held.

When we graduated in 1969, it was the beginning of flower power and the Age of Aquarius and everything about sex hitherto taboo was out there, front and center and in a way, that saved us. We were quick learners to this sexual revolution and it came not too soon. In the interim to college, we had a summer to become savvy to sex, to reframe its debased status and become instant adults with healthy libidos. That was a tall order.

For most of us privileged schoolboys, we went through that period of sexual naivete relatively unscathed, protected perhaps by sober advice from several of our more active and wiser classmates. But it would be a lie to state we all got off fine. Many look back now recalling incidents that brought unnecessary pain and heartache to first loves, destroyed friendships and caused self-destructive behavior. In the absence of truth our comportment on sex was crude, a far cry from the Christian Gentlemen we were branded to be. Years later, some of us endured unsatisfying relationships, failed marriages, and bewildered children also in the dark. Could these be traced too to our sexually illiterate youth?

If we got off a bit better, what about our poor male counterparts in public schools totally bereft of information, guided instead by feudal and chauvinistic impulses? Add male privilege to the brew and we have had a national norm that rationalizes the abuse of women and a society pockmarked with unwanted pregnancies, sexual trafficking and shattered families.

Brother Armin, who went through a La Salle education, graduating from high school almost a decade later from our batch may have also gone through a similar sex education drought.

The founder of the Christian brothers, John Baptist de la Salle, (1651 – 1719) would be dismayed if he were alive today and surveyed his progeny. Granted he did not live in these more open and liberating times, yet his principles and objectives still apply.

Brother John Baptist was regarded as an education reformer and the father of modern pedagogy. His life-long dedication to teaching particularly the poor, later earned him sainthood and enshrined as the patron saint of teachers.

He dispensed with Latin as the teaching language because he sensed his students learned better in their native tongue. He set up schools catered to both the rich and the poor. He urged the teaching of science as key to a solid education, a far cry from the faith-based teachings of that period.

Mathias Graham, a biographer, noted that Saint John Baptist was the first to eschew priests as teachers for his new schools because they would have spent much of the day to priestly obligations. Instead, he sought out men who wanted to live simply and humbly devoting their lives solely to teaching. They would be the first batch of Christian Brothers.

In addition, Graham would write presciently about Saint John Baptist’s pedagogic principle “…that nothing human should be foreign to the students, “ and that the teaching of science …(took) nothing from the teacher in his ministry as an apostle.”

To advocate for the continued teaching of sex education in public schools, Brother Armin may perhaps reflect on the absence of such education in his institution resulting in some sad experiences by his fellow alums. It needs to be said that such experiences prevailed in all other schools in the country.

Saint John Baptist’s preference for religious lay teachers rather than priests is instructive as well. On the issue in front of him, we would expect Brother Armin weighing in with the secular needs of the nation rather than canonical laws.

Lastly, the good Saint’s dictum that all human phenomena must be understood in the context of learning and bettering one’s life means the inclusion, two hundred years later, of the profundity of sex.

John L. Silva graduated from La Salle Green Hills in 1969