It’s Not a Taboo Topic in <i> Some </i> Schools : Sex education: Despite the controversy over Joycelyn Elders, some teachers already talk about masturbation. And abstinence. And abortion.

Maybe Joycelyn Elders should have come to California before she opened her mouth.

The surgeon general was fired earlier this month, ostensibly because she said masturbation is “something that perhaps should be taught” in schools.

In California, it often is.

State guidelines for sex education suggest that teachers talk about masturbation “in such a way as to dispel common myths associated with it . . . sterility, blindness, or feeble-mindedness.”

It is one of the more controversial subjects students are exposed to when they go to sex education class in some Southern California schools these days. The courses cover everything from abstinence to zygotes. At some schools there are lectures about abortion, condoms and relationships. Under state law, however, public schools must stress abstinence as the best defense against HIV, pregnancy and tangled relations. “Abstinence,” says a Laguna Beach middle-school teacher, “is the first and foremost thing we teach.”

The state guidelines are optional, but many schools in Southern California deal with masturbation because students ask about it. And the answer is often that masturbation is normal--and it won’t kill you. But educators stop short of including masturbation as part of the formal curriculum--or encouraging it as a form of abstinence. “There is no physical harm, but there should be no judgment about it really,” says Ruth Rich, health adviser at the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Instead of lurid talk or scare-charged black-and-white reels, sex ed today is a journey into biology, chemistry and illustrations of human innards. At Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, seventh-graders recently reiterated the rules of sex ed class: “There’s no dumb question,” says one. “Use scientific terms instead of slang,” says another. Teacher Cathy Golliher, who helped write the districtwide guidelines for sex ed, adds another rule: “We’re going to stay away from the personal level.”

According to SIECUS, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, 47 states require or recommend sex education. And at least 10 states, SIECUS says, have guidelines asking schools to address masturbation during sex education.

In Santa Monica, the private Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences teaches older students about masturbation (“that it’s not going to kill them and that most people do it,” an administrator says), homosexuality and intimate relationships. “We do it all,” says Tom Nolan, dean of students. “We encourage kids to wait, but we also teach contraception.”

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Several middle schools across Southern California are home to ENABL (Education Now and Babies Later), a state-funded class for seventh-graders that includes role-playing aimed to deflate sexual peer pressure. “Postponing sexual involvement is really the intent,” says Gail Sass Buckley, head of a pregnancy counseling center charged with teaching ENABL classes in Los Angeles.

Many sex education programs in Southern California are part of science, health and modern living courses, and start at the middle-school level, about the time preteens reach puberty. Many--including those at L.A. city schools--also require parental consent; without it, students sit out the sessions.

State guidelines recommend that serious sex talk start somewhere between grades six and nine. In L.A. city schools, birds-and-bees instruction--including abstinence and contraception--starts in grade seven with about three weeks’ worth. More instruction comes in the 10th grade.

In the San Diego Unified School District, the eighth-largest in the nation, teachers start talking about sex to sixth-graders. Girls get the menstruation speech in the fifth. And from then until high school graduation, students get taught about AIDS for one hour a year. And when sex is the topic from eighth grade on up, San Diego schools don’t ask parents for permission. “We do not need permission,” says district sex ed expert Marge Kleinsmith. She adds: “All sex ed materials are approved by an advisory committee of parents, educators and physicians.”

Proponents of sex education--many of whom agree with Elders--say more classroom time is better. Private researcher Marvin Eisen tracked 1,500 teen-agers in California and Texas during the late ‘80s and found that the more sex education students had, the more likely they were to abstain or use contraception. “Good sex education programs,” he says, “can have a good effect.”

Educators argue that sex education is important in an era when more students are having sex. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a sexuality research group in New York City, teen birth rates have stopped growing but are still high. But more than 1 million teen-agers become pregnant each year--and those who do have babies are very likely to be poor and unmarried.

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Still, educators complain that they don’t have enough time to teach reproductive basics. The community piles on extra helpings of curricula every year--from the back-to-basics movement to computer science--and sex ed suffers, says Rich of L.A. Unified. “We’re seeing less and less time for it,” she says.

Rich says the district’s sex education now has to be bolstered by special grants from the state--grants for special programs such as ENABL that don’t reach all the city’s schoolchildren. In San Diego, sex ed--with the exception of elementary school courses and AIDS education--was cut two years ago. Now some eighth-graders have a private grant to thank for their sex education. “Much of the cuts are due to politics, as you’re well aware,” says San Diego’s Kleinsmith.

At the same time, she argues, “kids are not taking care of themselves.”

Some say schools should stay out of sex ed.

“Religion, sex education--all these controversial things should be taught by the mom and dad,” says Susan Carpenter McMillan, president of a conservative group called the Woman’s Coalition. “Masturbation is for mommy and daddy to teach about.”

But experts say parents don’t like sex talk.

“If parents talked to kids, then these issues wouldn’t be so powerful and their kids would be getting the message they want and they wouldn’t have to go to school to get it,” says psychologist Gail L. Zellman, a youth specialist at Rand, the Santa Monica research institute.

She says the reason sex in schools is such a controversial topic--why surgeon generals get fired and school boards get booted--is that “we’re a culture that’s based in puritanical precepts with the belief that we should keep our feelings in check.”