Sex Education in Swedish Schools: The Facts and the Fiction

Abstract

In no other area are the myths about Sweden quite so strongly believed as in the domain of sexual activity and sex education. It appears that some Americans believe Sweden to be a country where from infancy or at least from kindergraten on children are provided with a battery of clinical sexual information designed to encourage them to become precociously and incessantly sexually active. Even social commentators who are more charitably disposed toward Sweden would probably argue that it was possible for Sweden to become the 1st country in the world to make sex education compulsory in schools only because of the unique tolerance and sexual openness of the Swedish people. The 1st picture bears no resemblance to reality and the 2nd position lacks historical perspective. It is true that as early as 1942 in response to active pressure from womens associations some doctors and the Swedish Association for Sexual Education (established in 1933 by Elsie Ottesen-Jensen) the Swedish government recommended the introduction of sex education into schools. In 1934 Gunnar Myrdal and his wife Alva published a book showing that poor Swedish families with a lot of children suffered from low standards of housing nutrition and education. The Myrdals argued that improved living conditions and the reduction of unwanted pregnancies among such families could best be realized if among other programs more systematic information about birth control were made available particularly as part of the school curriculum. Most of the Myrdals recommended reforms were eventually accepted (including repeal of a prohibition against contraceptive information) but their views and those of Ottesen-Jensen and her colleagues were considered highly controversial at the time and came under severe attack from conservatives on both moral and political grounds. Many of the arguments made against sex education in Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s will probably sound familiar to Americans today. In Sweden the emphasis in the compulsory sex education program has shifted away from the neutral imparting of reproductive knowldge and toward increased emphasis on the emotional ethical side of love relationships. In keeping with that development even the name of the school subject has been changed from "sex education" or "sexual instruction" to the much broader "education about living together." Sex was taken out of the title to emphasize the social and affective aspects of sexual relationships and to deemphasize the technical and physical aspects. Swedish sex educators maintain that if young people see that sexual matters are surrounded by silence secrecy shame and fear they will quickly come to believe that there is something wrong with their own feelings about sexuality.