I REMEMBER to this day the shock, the horror, and acute disappointment when my sister, almost four years older than me, first told me about the facts of life. Santa Claus, she revealed, did not exist.

I was, I estimate, about three at the time, and spent the next few weeks crying out in rage at my sense of loss. Thankfully, I was able to spend the next 10 years or so before being confronted with the facts that really do lead to the creation of life.

Now there may be the odd parent out there who feels that this column should be hidden away from the kiddywinks in case it raises their curiosity. Sadly, they would almost certainly be wasting their time because today's children probably know more about s*x than we, the wrinklies, every dreamed of.

Reason: the hours spent in today's schools on s*x education in which the human reproductive system is explained in cutaway drawings which, in my day, tended to show the working of the internal combustion engine.

It is necessary, say our politically correct teachers, for youngsters to know these things so that they do not get themselves into trouble.

The result: Britain now has the highest rate in Europe of illegitimate children born to girls under the age of 16. Tens of thousands of girls as young as 13 get themselves pregnant every year, a figure matched in the Western world only by the slum populations of big American cities.

And if that were not enough, the Department of Education is now considering new plans to teach five-year-olds the common names for their 'naughty bits' so that discussions can be held in class on the differences between boys and girls.

This is necessary, according to an official report, because by the time they get to primary school, children may have already learned a 'sense of s*xual identity.'

What a load of naughty male bits. I knew the difference between boys and girls when I was five: boys wore (short) trousers and climbed trees; girls wore dresses and played with dolls until they became so-called 'tom-boys' and climbed trees too.

I knew, too, that they were shaped rather differently but it was not until my teens that I began to find out how. No-one had ever shown me a cutaway drawing, thank goodness, so those first explorations gave the most unexpected joy of discovery.

Show a little boy a cutaway drawing of a car engine and he will want to dismantle it to see how it works. The same happens, I suspect, with drawings of little girls.

So when s*x becomes a study in mechanics rather than mystery, love - even puppy love - is quite unnecessary: whilst we used to dissect flowers in biology lessons, today's youngsters dissect each other just like any other science lesson.

It is not often that I agree with some of the blather spouted by teachers' trade unions but this time, one of their leaders got it right when he said: 'Nobody is going to have a childhood if we go on like this.' Amen to that.

l The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.