The tragedy of these sex education plans is that five year olds might miss the joke

Most people look back fondly at their sex education classes, remembering the stammering, red faced teachers, the very silly jokes and the endless, irrepressible giggles. The real tragedy about this week’s proposals to teach five-year-olds about sex is that children that small may not see the funny side of it. Generations of policy makers, teachers and journalists have spent years agonising over the question, while generations of schoolchildren have spent the happy hours of the PSHE classes passing notes, thinking up absurd innuendoes and flirting outrageously, eyes shining with laughter.

But perhaps the privilege of having whole lessons given over to such cheerful pastimes was only ever to be a flash in the pan. In 1930, the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke of the need to liberate sex from negative warnings and restraints. The Spectator supported him; at the time, sex did need a bit of liberating.

Looking backward, every thinking person who stands in any responsible relation to children must be appalled at the thought of the dangers which used wrong-headedly to be accepted: boys and girls, becoming aware of the most powerful instincts and impulses of human nature, were left in a cruel position of loneliness.