ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author analyses the manual and the debates surrounding sex education, drawing attention to the Scandinavian state school as an arena of knowledge and curriculum texts as source material. She delimits between four different bodies of sexual knowledge that played an important role in Norwegian sex education in the 1970s: biological, Christian, psychological, and social statistical knowledge. Biological knowledge had constituted the foundation of Norwegian sex education in school, as it was developed by a joint effort of radical and social democratic teachers and doctors campaigning for better sexual hygiene in the interwar years. In the 1960s and 1970s, politicians, medical doctors, psychologists, and teachers demanded a new and updated sex education. Some of them, such as Sverre Asmervik, argued that this should be based on psychological knowledge on healthy sexuality. The regulation was more indirect, and the youths’ own capabilities for reflecting upon and managing sexual choices became the “desired” outcome of sex education in school.
