In junior high schools last week, Oregon boys & girls of 12 and 13 were learning the facts of life from a film. After nearly ten years of cautious preparation, the state of Oregon had taken a bold step. It was sponsoring a film that candidly brought before mixed adolescent audiences the truth about menstruation, reproduction, glands and growth.
Human Growth calls a Fallopian tube a Fallopian tube. Through this film and question-&-answer periods stimulated by it, Oregon hoped to take sex education out from behind the barn and into the class room.
Margin for Error. Oregon's high venereal disease rate in the '30s had worried Dr. E. C. Brown, a VD specialist who thought that more knowledge would mean less disease. Before his death in 1939, Brown gave $500,000 to the University of Oregon for sex education. Six years later, the state legislature made the subject compulsory in junior and senior high schools. Oregon first tried pamphlets, lectures and then lantern slides, but found too much margin for error and embarrassment on the part of teachers. In 1946 Professor Lester F. Beck, a University of Oregon psychologist, worked out a movie script. Its thesis: "The love life of the worm is an evasion of the human problem. Human sex should be taught honestly and scientifically." He tried his script on other scientists and educators, then submitted it to nine Hollywood producers. A documentary firm run by Actor Eddie (Brother Rat) Albert got the job.
Oregon had wanted to use professional child actors, but Eddie Albert was convinced that amateurs would do better. He sold the idea to the principal of Emerson Junior High in West Los Angeles, picked students there to act the part of questioning schoolkids. Two Emerson youngsters —George Enoch, 13, and Josie Kegley, 12 —were "starred." Albert hired three professional actors to play the teacher, father and mother.
Casual & Decent. The 20-minute film opens in the living room of a respectable, middle-class family. Opening his textbook to the picture of a naked Indian, the boy asks his father why savages didn't wear clothes while civilized people do. That starts a family bull-session about sex, to make the audience realize that sex can be casually and decently discussed.
Then comes a schoolroom shot, of a class about to be shown a movie. The film-within-a-film is an animated cartoon done by two ex-Disney artists—with no Disney gags. It explains the processes of sex and pregnancy with simplified diagrams and a minimum of anatomical detail (at first the tails of spermatozoa were shown wiggling in their movements to reach and fertilize the ovum, but technical advisers feared that schoolkids might associate the wiggling with human swimming, break into nervous laughter).
In the final scene, the children raise frank questions about the animated film, which the teacher answers. The movie ends on an intentionally abrupt note, to suggest that there are other questions left unasked and unanswered. Professor Beck has prepared a classroom manual to get the Oregon teachers past the toughest questions.
Previewed by Oregon parents and teachers before release to the classrooms,