Why the left wants sex education in schools

By Roberto de Mattei   |   26 November 2025

For many years the introduction of so-called sex education in Italian schools has constituted one of the most coveted goals of parties on the left. Sex education, along with divorce, abortion and euthanasia, was part of that package of “civil achievements” championed in the 1970s by communists, socialists and radicals, in order to undermine Italian society at its very foundations.

These demands go back a long way. Without dredging up the French Revolution, it is enough to recall that the Communist Revolution of the twentieth century, especially in its initial Lenin-Trotsky phase, set out to transform not only the social and economic order but also the vision of man, the family and education.

During the brief but tumultuous period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–May 1919), György Lukács, a Marxist philosopher and People’s Commissar for Education and Culture, launched one of the most audacious attempts to culturally reform a European nation according to the principles of Bolshevism. In those two months — studied by historians like Werner Jung (Georg Lukács, Metzler, 2017) and Michael Löwy (Georg Lukacs: From Romanticism to Bolshevism, Verso Books, 1979) —Lukács devoted himself to a radical transformation of school programmes. Among the most significant measures was the elimination of Catholic religious education, which for centuries had shaped the moral conscience of Hungarian families and young people. This teaching was replaced with Marxist sociology, which Lukács considered the theoretical basis necessary to create a “new type of person”, freed from Christian tradition and natural institutions — starting with the family. At the same time, Lukács introduced a programme of sex education in schools, conceived as part of the break with religious morality. The goal was not only to provide information about the body but to deconstruct what Lukács called the “repressive morality of bourgeois society”, namely, Christian principles regarding purity, modesty and the relationship between sexuality and family responsibility.

These measures, though very short-lived due to the rapid collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, nonetheless set a historical precedent: for the first time in Europe, a revolutionary government attempted to reform sexuality and morality starting in schools, replacing the teaching of the family and the Church with an education imbued with political ideology. Lukács’s ideas did not remain isolated. They found an echo in communist Russia, where in the following years various pedagogical experiments, such as Vera Schmidt’s psychoanalytic nursery school in Moscow, were oriented toward the same goal: to free children from traditional “moral constraints”, encouraging the early expression of sexual impulses in the name of a future regenerated socialist society.

In 1929, Soviet officials invited one of Freud’s students, the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, for a series of lectures that led to the publication in Moscow of his essay Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, the founding text of so-called Freudo-Marxism. In this and his subsequent works Reich presents the family as the repressive social institution par excellence and asserts that the core of happiness lies in sexual gratification. Sex education is an integral part of his plan for the revolutionary transformation of society. The ideas of Reich and other Freudo-Marxist theorists like Marcuse triumphed with the Revolution of ‘68 and became part of the political legacy of the international left.

The Church and right reason instead show us how the transmission of life continues, within the family, in the education of the one who is the fruit of an act of divine and human love: a man endowed with body and soul. Benedict XVI reiterated that education is one of the “non-negotiable values”, alongside life and family, to which it is intimately linked. The right of parents to educate their children precedes that of civil society and cannot be expropriated by the state, above all when it presumes to replace religious and moral education with sex education, based on an antithetical vision of man. Sex education is always bad when it claims to be scholastic, that is, public, while it can only be personal and private, and therefore must naturally be entrusted to families, otherwise it risks becoming a form of cultural and moral corruption.

Draft bill no. 2423, “Provisions regarding informed consent in schools”, introduced by education minister Giuseppe Valditara on 23 May 2025, included a ban on sex education in nursery and primary schools. On 15 October, however, the Chamber of Deputies’ Culture Commission approved an amendment from the League party extending the ban to secondary schools, allowing sex education only in high schools and, in any case, only with the consent of parents (or for students of majority age). In secondary schools only basic topics like reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases were to be allowed — a good amendment, then, which naturally provoked an outcry from the left. The restrictive text was approved in committee, but on 10 November, once the floor debate began, the League backed out: MP Giorgia Latini introduced a new amendment that eliminates the change approved in committee and restores the original text, banning sex education only in nursery and primary school, no longer in secondary school. This about-face on the part of the majority forces, and of the League in particular, is surprising.

The left is consistent when it demands mandatory sex education in schools of every stage and year. They are not consistent who claim to oppose the left but then give in to its demands or who toe the line in a sensitive and vulnerable area like the education of our children.