There is no sex education in the Beauneville schools, because the teens of Beauneville do not have sex.
Not in public, that is.
The truth is, teens of Beauneville are quite well informed about sex. How are they so well informed if there is no sex education in school? Teens in Beauneville are no different than teens anywhere else in the world; they read, they talk to one another, they surf the internet, they watch TV.
In today's world, you have to be willfully ignorant, blind or stupid to not know something about sex.
Total unwanted teen pregnancies in Beauneville last year: zero.
Total cases of STDs among the teens of Beauneville last year: one. But Donnie Clapper caught that in Stapleton.
The school nurse at Beaunville Latin does not hand out free condoms. Roderick knows this because the Science Team wants to try an experiment with condoms, and Roderick asked the nurse. She told him to go to Zeppelin Drugs and buy some. The parents and teachers of Beauneville don't feel inclined to stamp out teenage sex, but they also don't feel inclined to subsidize it.
There are no abortion clinics in Beauneville. They're not prohibited, but demand is low, since folks in Beauneville (adults and teens alike) figured out a long time ago that it's not that difficult to avoid "accidental" pregnancies. There's even a word for Beauneville girls who get pregnant by accident.
Stupid.
Although there is no class in Beauneville High called "Sex Education", instructors frankly weave the topic into lectures as appropriate. In American Literature, Mr. Cooper contrasts New England Puritan writers with the bawdy English writers of the Restoration and other texts that circulated in the colonies. Mr. Gibbon freely weaves the history of sex into his narrative, deftly navigating between eroticism and war.
In Latin, Philodemus, Marcus Argentarius, Sappho of Lesbos, Catullus, Ovid, Martial, Juvenal and Priapeia are all on the docket. Mr. Horace does not "bowdlerize" the translations. Megan Cupcake finds this part of the class interesting. Very interesting. She makes a note to herself to spend lots of time studying Latin with Roderick.
Try as he might, Mr. Euler is unable to weave eroticism into his Math lectures. Actually, he doesn't try at all. Mr. Euler is pretty straight-laced, and the hour from one to two is an eros-free zone. There is a refrigerator in the back of the room with cans of Red Bull.
Miss Agassiz, the Biology teacher, is so blindingly hot that she doesn't need to weave eroticism into her lecture.
The same pattern applies to electives. In Art History, erotic art is freely mentioned; in Italian, Boccacio and Bracciolini are prominently featured; French Literature includes a unit on Toulet, Mirbeau and Lorrain.
When teaching Human Figure in Art class, Mr. Botticelli does not promote eroticism, but instead encourages students to understand and appreciate the nude human form in purely aesthetic terms. He thinks that Molly Bloom, who is slim, curvaceous and completely blond, is the perfect model; he is encouraged by the heavy enrollment in the class, especially by boys.
