U.S. Marines in a communications shop played a prank on naive young boys who arrived at Camp Pendleton many years ago, straight from boot camp.
Our World War II radios had large glass tubes that often broke or burned out, so each soldier or PFC spent time in Southern California going to various supply huts with a clipboard full of progress. If a child looked young and innocent enough, the communications sergeant would send him out in search of fallopian tubes.
The joke was that the company supply would say, “Awww man, fallopian tubes – maybe you should try the battalion supply,” and then the battalion would say these are handled at the division level, the division would send the guy to the regiment send, and so on. Soon our gullible naive would fill out a form asking Washington to send us a large shipment of Fallopian tubes.
I don’t know how many young Marines fell for it. But when they sent me, I jumped in a Jeep and went to Camp PX to read comic books and drink milkshakes all day.
Then I went back to the radio hut and pretended to be grumpy. Awww, you guys…
The fallopian tube trick worked because schools at the time did not teach anything about human reproduction. We knew the rough terms for different activities and physical attractions; we just weren’t getting any factual or biology-based stuff in class.
The Marine Corps probably replaced those big glass tubes with some kind of chips long ago, and the old salts certainly have clever new hoaxes for recruits.
Maybe in a few years they can bring back the Fallopian tube fakes – at least for Florida Marines.
Education Commissioner Manny Diaz talks to his colleagues during the opening day of the 2023 Florida Legislative Session, Tuesday, March 7, 2023.
Our Department of Education, which complies with legislative edicts, is pandering to the Victorian prudishness of pressure groups like Moms for Liberty. The department has determined that sex education curricula in public schools should avoid, as much as possible, discussion of what used to be blushingly called “the facts of life.”
The idea, often cited by Governor Ron DeSantis, is that the state should educate, not indoctrinate. Therefore, instruction in human reproduction should begin with abstinence and… well, it should pretty much end there. It is a lofty ideal and scientifically accurate in that abstinence works every time it is used.
The only problem is that, if we go back to the time of Adam and Eve, it is not abstinence that has failed; it’s the attempt to abstain that many people don’t quite succeed at.
“A state government should not emphasize or encourage sexual activity among children or minors and is therefore right to emphasize abstinence,” a Department of Education official told the Associated Press.
But that’s like saying that learning about Beethoven will entice children to write symphonies, or that studying politicians will produce a generation of shameless liars. If we keep our own teenage years in mind, we can safely assume that middle and high school kids are already aware of these things, without teachers “emphasizing or encouraging” them.
It would be nice if we could keep our children blissfully innocent well into adulthood. But we can’t.
What really bothers parental pressure groups and Republican lawmakers is that sex education will tarnish moral issues and actions that make some people blush. If someone really has to mention homosexuality, transgender issues, or abortion, he or she wants to label it as something shameful and perverse – you know, the right kind of indoctrination.
Is it better for young people to get information in the classroom, or to get attitudes shaped by TV comedies or – heaven forbid – the Internet? Education is education, even if it makes us uncomfortable, even if we wish we didn’t have to talk about things.
When my son was in fourth grade, there was a Newspapers in Education program that provided copies of our newspaper to the schools every morning. I offered to register my child’s class, and his teacher was thrilled — but asked if we should wait until President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky disappeared from the front page.
Okay, we can keep it age appropriate. Fourth graders do not need the same curriculum as high school students. But any education is better than graduating from high school thinking fallopian tubes are part of an old-fashioned radio.
Bill Cotterell is a retired Capitol reporter for United Press International and the Tallahassee Democrat. He can be reached at wrcott43@aol.com
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Bill Cotterell: Restricting sex education is a big mistake
