Prologue: Valle Agua Azul

Virtually everyone has had the dream, the nightmare, of being in school and having all your friends, your classmates, your teachers looking and pointing at you, and talking about you, because you are NAKED! You are completely exposed with nothing hidden and nothing to hide behind. No matter where you go, people are watching you and you can't find anything to put on. And no one is willing to give you anything to cover you up.

But is it possible that being naked in school could have a beneficial effect? That not having clothes to hide behind could, somehow, help a teenager to confront and disassemble the persona they project to the outside world. That forcing them to tackle the issues inherent in their sexuality, and that of their peers, could help them become better individuals, with better tools to cope with life?

The Naked in School Program could not be introduced into a public school without much preparation beforehand. A committee runs a public school system and no committee is going to adopt a radical new concept just because it might be a good idea. Parent-teacher conferences, for example, took years to make the leap from private to public schools, and a decade for it to filter across the United States.

Before any new concept is adopted by a public school, hard questions have to be answered. Questions like:

"Whose idea was this?"

"What are their bona fides?"

"Is this some lone researcher in the publish-or-perish world of academia, or the work of a serious practitioner in the field?"

"What research supports the concept and what were its conclusions?"

And most important of all, for no school committee wants their school to be the first guinea pig (just think of the bad publicity of a failed experiment, not to mention lawsuits!):

"What other school has done this and did it work?"

Therefore, before the Naked in School Program could be introduced to society, it required research. That it would be a constructive experience for students to participate in the nude in school was a truly radical concept. Studies of how exposure to alternate lifestyles prevented many teens from becoming adults with prejudicial attitudes, or even hard bigotry, towards others seemed to confirm the hypothesis, but the researcher needed hard data. Data that would confirm his belief that being nude in school would force teens to confront their fears about their bodies, their imagined shortcomings, and even their sexual orientation, with an ultimately beneficial result for both them and society.

A few published papers failed to garner him the support he needed. An accidental intervention on his part with the troubled teen of an influential industrialist brought him to the attention a large multi-national corporation's board of trustees. They had a severe problem with a private school they ran for their employees in a foreign country. They had tried other solutions with no success and were willing to give him a chance.

Valle Agua Azul, isolated from mainstream society, out of the possible attention of media, was a perfect location for his experiment. Helping matters was the company policy of demanding that all employees sign nondisclosure contracts, with severe penalties for breaching the agreements. It was the perfect environment for a controlled experiment.

All employees with high-school-aged children were told of a new, radical program at the Corporation's high school and given the opportunity to participate. Employees with troubled teens, or teens considered "at risk" (an educational code term which means "likely to drop out") were encouraged to try the new program. To sweeten the deal, parents with students in the high school would get raises, promotions, or both. That summer saw a lot of employees transfer in and out of the Blue Water Valley facility.

They gave the parents a brief outline of The Program they were initiating at the high school. There was a warning that it included nude sex-education as a major component, to assist the teenaged students in making the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Most parents assumed that meant a class in sex education that had professional models posing nude.

For any scientific study to be valid it must have clear objectives and clear instructions. The Blue Water Valley study had these. How the results, if positive, would be integrated into a public school system was an open question. Committees are notorious for making "improvements" when they introduce a "new" program. But that was a future study. For now, the researcher concentrated on his current work.

Chapter 1A »