I read this article and raised my eyebrows a little bit.
On the one hand, a good friend at work didn’t enroll her fifth-grade son in ‘Family Studies’ this year. “He’s kind of immature for his age,” she explained, “and still at the ‘Ewww, gross!’ stage where he can’t even look at couples kissing in movies. How’s he supposed to cope with condoms and gays and fallopian tubes?” The class is offered for grades four through seven. He’ll probably be taking it in the last possible year, and in the meantime his parents won’t say anything about sex, much less STDs, physiology, the sexual spectrum, or etc etc. The article says it’s not the school’s job to provide ‘morality training,’ but how can parents provide this so-called training if they don’t start with the biological and social basics? You can’t build a house without a foundation, and if you just start off with, “Son, there are families out there with two moms, OK?” he’ll have to go, “Whaa?” So is that the school’s job or the family’s job, if you can’t separate biology and morality in your culture?
On the other hand, a gay friend and I were discussing the education at our backwards little Catholic schools in the heart of Grey Nun country. The topic of sex ed came up and was generally mocked and reviled – how backwards it was, how we were being told ‘Save it for marriage!’ before we had quite figured out what ‘it’ was, or what you were supposed to call the bits covered by your underwear. At my elementary school I think we started sex ed in grade 5. Too early? Too late? What do you have to include for kids that age? And what (more importantly) should you leave out? “It would have meant so much to me if they could have just mentioned homosexuality,” my friend said thoughtfully. “Just mentioned it. I spent most of my education thinking I was the only gay guy in the entire city.” He’s quite right. They didn’t say “Don’t be gay because it says so in the Bible,” or “Don’t be gay or the Pope will come to your house and lay the smackdown.” They simply didn’t say anything at all, good or bad. I must’ve been twelve or thirteen before I figured out what ‘gay’ was (reading a volume of Roman history, I stopped to look up the word ‘catamite’ in our huge old 1938 Oxford dictionary, which was quite explicit, though I had to look up a couple more words after that). So there’s that – if a kid’s parents won’t condone or condemn it, should the schools at least let you know it exists? Is that their job, is that part of their mandate as surrogate parents for eight hours a day?
NB: If I ever have kids, the plan is to let the school take care of the ‘What is gonorrhea?’ part of sex ed, as well as ‘How many ‘i’s are there in ‘epididymis’?' The nice part is, I get to avoid the really disgusting questions while being able to answer the easy ones like ‘What’s gay?’ by pointing to a photo of their ‘uncles’ in one of my albums. Why make things difficult for myself? 
Parents are generally overly conservative in what their children are taught in school. I remember a number of parents protesting the content taught to their kids in math class because what they were learning wasn’t applicable to their destined career as a farm hand. I think the reality of the situation was that the parents didn’t want their children asking them questions that would make them feel uncomfortable, which often includes any question that they don’t know the answer to. My bet is that your friend from work has a hard time coping with gays, condoms, and fallopian tubes and would rather not have her kid bringing up the subject.
Having kids fully aware of the multitude of family structures is entirely different from sex education. The two topics aren’t related in the slightest. I was taught in school about families of single mothers, two Aunts, a couple of uncles, etc.. and not once did I think to myself whether those two Aunts ever had intercourse. The idea is ludicrous. So why would a child start asking anything related to sex when introduced to the idea of a family having two moms?
I think I can only speak for myself on this one, but there were enough books lying around our house that I pretty much knew you needed a sperm and an egg somewhere in the equation.
If someone had told me when I was this kid’s age that there were families with two moms, I probably would have crossed my arms and stubbornly demanded, “But where did the baby come from?”
Readers, other thoughts on sex ed and/or the ability of younguns to cope with it?
Actually Premee the puppets that told us about private parts and the begins of sexuality were in grade 2 (I believe). The video showing the journey of the sperm, as part of the act of intercourse, through the male, into the female and up to fertilizing the egg was in grade 5.
That all said, my mother and I sat down with all the medical books in grade three to talk through the whole being a woman and menstrual cycle thing because my boobs were so big she wanted me to be prepared at any time. I of course then showed up at school and blabbed all the juicy details.
Oh and yeah … this is Julie (not Warren) … just to clarify my husband has never had a period. Whew, glad we got that cleared up.
It’s OK, I figured it was you based on Warren not having boobs.