I’m 18, so maybe I can add on a bit to what I said before, because a lot of people on here who are opposed to teaching 10 year olds about sex ed are generally content with them learning the material when they’re teens (i.e. 13, 14, or even 15 years old). It hasn’t been long since I’ve been that age, so maybe I can shed some light on this.
Being in High School/Middle School is NOT the same environment you are a part of when you are in Elementary School. It’s as different as night and day. If a kid has his/her first sex-ed class at the age of 14, then it really isn’t going to be that effective. Why? Because all around them, their peers are having sex, doing drugs, and to them, they seem perfectly fine. In fact, they seem better than fine, because a lot of teens even look up to and wish they were the one having all that sex and having all that fun. Does this apply to every kid in High School? No, absoultely not. But there is a large pool of kids who do think this way and it would be silly of us to ignore that.
Elementary School is different. Teaching a kid about sex when they are 10 isn’t going to backfire on you, because the other kids in the school aren’t doing it, and if they were, they’d most likely get called “yucky”, or some would even think that they’ve contracted “cooties”. Because of this, educating the children while they are still young, and NOT in High/Middle School is going to be far more effective, simply because people around them aren’t doing the exact opposite of what the teacher had taught them. When I got taught sex-ed at 10 years old, my teacher told us to wait until marriage, not because it was morally right (that’s up to the individual to decide), but because if a pregnancy does happen, we’ll be a lot more prepared to deal with it. Heck, at age 10, I didn’t ever want to get married. Kissing a girl seemed like taboo, let alone sleeping with her. And I feel that that knowledge has served me well, because even though my High School was a lot like most other peoples High Schools (there were some people I knew who were having sex), and I did get taught a bit of sex-ed as well, the whole concept wasn’t alien to me, and because of what I learned in fifth grade, I was already well aware of the consequences of unsafe, pre-maritial sex, and I knew which people I needed to steer-clear of.