Sex & the Barn Door

Where do U.S. boys get their sex education, and are they satisfied with it? John M. Walker, 24, a married veteran at New York's Colgate University, thought that the answers would make a good term paper. Last week Colgate released Walker's study of 100 undergraduates.

Walker's sample ranged in age from 18 to 30, included married men and ex-G.I.s. Most of them had picked up their knowledge of sex from friends their own age or slightly older. Parents and schools, who ought to have helped, had failed miserably.

Fathers who tried to tell their sons the "facts of life" usually intended to be "honest, helpful and above-board," the Walker jury agreed, but all too often the parental presentation was "vague and intangible." As for help from high-school courses in hygiene, these met almost universal scorn. What they required, agreed the Colgate men, was a course that was frankly and fully sex education.

Only one group--64% of the private-school graduates--felt satisfied with the sex education they had received before coming to Colgate. (Walker was undecided whether to credit this attitude to better sex education in private schools--or blame it on "youthful naivete.") Two older, sadder and presumably wiser groups--married men (100%) and ex-G.I.s (83%) --reported that they had not known enough answers to "meet [their] needs."

To pull up its own socks, Colgate promptly invited an M.D. to give two public lectures, revised its required natural sciences course to put more emphasis on physiology of sex. But professors were inclined to agree with Walker, who said: "Sex education on the college level is closing the barn after the horse has run away . . . The job should be started in the grammar schools or earlier."

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