I remember in elementary school we had a lesson on sex organs. When I turned in my test paper, I curiously asked my teacher, “If the sperm is in the male, and the egg is in the female, how does the sperm transfer over?”

All she said was, “Well, what do you think?” To which I replied, “I don’t know.” Then I quietly returned to my desk. Later I discussed it with my friend and we concluded that a male must pee into a female. Because at the time, pee was the only thing we knew came out of the penis.

Christian teachers showing us pictures of STI infections that had been left alone for probably years before the patient went to/was able to go to a doctor in an effort to scare us into celibacy. Generally a scarring experience that didn’t really teach us anything other than to practice safe sex.

*This was in the early 2000s IIRC.

Reading through the comments I remembered about a really great sex-positive TV show I would always watch late at night at around the same time my public education failed in teaching me about sex. The hosts were a really attractive Asian-looking guy with flowy hair and always wore a silk shirt with the top 2-3 buttons undone and a really attractive white girl that always wore a lot of tight clothes. They went over a lot of topics regarding attraction, safe-sex, how to deal with STIs; however, I don’t think there were any specific segments on anything LGBTQ+, but IIRC they didn’t need to because they way they presented things were easily applied to any sexual orientation. As in they talked about anal sex and how to do it safely and whatnot without specifically saying gex. I would love to read more about it, so if you know what it was called please lmk.

9th grade. Public school. Teacher opens the first class with “All penises are the same size” and “I don’t answer questions. That’s what your handouts are for”. I can’t for the life of me understand how my generation had such a high teenage pregnancy rate, can you?

I had an surprising one, actually: I went to a private religious school, but I had a strangely comprehensive sex education.

It started with unvarnished discussions of human anatomy and cautions about sexual abuse around age 8, and then moved on to the basics of (hetero)sexuality by the time I was a preteen. In high school that continued, though talk about birth control was postponed until the health units of later physical education courses, which not everyone took. Of course, the stress was always that sexual activity should be limited to monogamous (heterosexual) marriage, and there was no mention of anything outside of the hetero-normative.

The last wrinkle was that it was all opt-out. At every point, there was at least one person who would leave the room for the duration of the class because their parents really didn’t want them learning about naughty bits.

So it ended up actually providing a pretty good foundation. It was still incomplete and biased, but a lot better than what you would expect when you hear “private religious school.”

I was raised partially in a Unitarian Universalist church which believes in comprehensive sex education. I was still a dumbass about it but they definitely tried to inform me and I think I have a healthier sex life than most people have had.

Watching a 60y/o blind woman put a condom on a wooden banana waaaaaay bigger than any penis I’ve ever seen.

I had several classes during different years, but what I recall from the first, in middle school during the mid 90s, was our teacher, Bunny Morris. She was memorizable because her son was nationally renowned pop artist Burton Morris.

She was fine. I recall that she started her class with the statement that “we are all sexual beings”, which sounded cheesey to me at the time but in hindsight seems like a very lucid mission statement for introducing preteens to sexual education.

I don’t remember the specifics, but I have great sexual health as an adult, so I suppose she did her job. It definitely wasn’t the shamey kind.

In the UK in the 1970s we were shown cross sections of male and family reproductive organs and copied pages out of a textbook about the essential mechanics. I can’t remember any discussion or moral guidance in the slightest. But then at that point I was well into my ‘hedge porn’ stage so that’s how I really educated myself.

Catholic school in the UK in the early 00s - basically “here’s what a condom is because the government says we have to show you, now wait till you’re married and don’t be gay”

My parents had bought a book on the subject to read to us kids. I got a hold of it first and read it by myself. When my dad brought me to bed, I “educated” him about where kids come from. It’s still one of my parents’ favorite stories about me as a kid.

In school, sex ed was alright. They taught us everything we need to know incl. how to prevent STDs and pregnancies. The only thing I would criticize in hindsight is that they used giant test tubes (25cm) to teach us how to put on condoms. That made a lot of boys feel inadequate.

Over flowery words from my mother, as soon as I started asking.

I can’t recall if it was on the second or third year of high school, but it was a single Biology class. The teacher was comfortable with it, but she was very clearly biased towards abstinence and insisted the only way to be 100% sure was to just not have sex.

Despite that, she still talked about basics of sex and genitalia, a few common STDs, and basic preventive measures, both for pregnancy and STDs - even if they weren’t particularly effective. Both coitus interruptus and sodomy (we had a loooot of fun repeating that word for a week or so) were mentioned as ways to avoid pregnancy, but condoms and IUDs were the real recommendations.

As a class, we weren’t too rowdy, though there was a kid or two that made a few too many jokes - and the teacher cut them off fairly quickly. I also recall she handled pamphlets with each of the methods talked during class and their approximate efficacy.

This was in 2005-ish and I’m Brazilian.

Also of note this was the second time, the first attempt happened in middle school (and in a different school altogether) and we had to do a presentation on STDs and the like. The teacher decided to cancel at the last minute because we were clearly too embarrassed to actually talk about the subject in front of our classmates.

Almost 100% via public school.

My first sex-ed class was in fourth grade, then another in fifth and sixth grade. In junior high and high school I was required to take general health courses that covered aspects of sex.

My religious parents didn’t teach me shit and I wish they had.

Me with zero knowledge of anything sexual down to even how to do sexual intercourse or the existence of oral sex, knowing what consent is, anything. No idea.

I was almost a teen and stumbled on an obscure sex forum. It wasn’t pornography, it was all informational. I started reading about stuff, it astounded me, it sounded like fiction. I learned how to masturbate correctly, I learned how to do sexual things, and I learned about consent. As a result, I waited until I was comfy with another person doing that stuff to me. I have never had a bad sexual experience, and I have had every partner tell me about how much they enjoy experiences with me.

I thank that forum for that. I’m very lucky I was taught by the best source I could imagine… and that I was curious enough to read and learn for a long while before actually doing stuff.

Switzerland:

• We had it first when I was in 6th grade in biology. This was mostly here are your reproductive organs and here is what happens when you reproduce.

• Second time was in 8th grade, here we had once again everything we had in primary school + a little more in-deph + including a little bit genetics & sexuall illnesses.

• That year we also had a talk about consent, birth controll and struggles of teen pregnancy in houskeeping class.

• Later that year we had STD prevention week, where they explained every known STD and their symptoms including images of the sympthoms+ showed interviews with people afected and the history of the STDs and how they are treated ect. (That was scary AF, but hey we got free condoms)

• Later I moved to the Gymnasium and we had it once again but mostly focusing on genetics.

Edit: this is where I lived in Switzerland and not for the whole country as in Switzetland every Kanton has their own school ecosystem)