The Sex Education Debates

The Sex Education Debates
Author: Nancy Kendall
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2013
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0226922278

Educating children and adolescents in public schools about sex is a deeply inflammatory act in the United States. Since the 1980s, intense political and cultural battles have been waged between believers in abstinence until marriage and advocates for comprehensive sex education. In The Sex Education Debates, Nancy Kendall upends conventional thinking about these battles by bringing the school and community realities of sex education to life through the diverse voices of students, teachers, administrators, and activists. Drawing on ethnographic research in five states, Kendall reveals important differences and surprising commonalities shared by purported antagonists in the sex education wars, and she illuminates the unintended consequences these protracted battles have, especially on teachers and students. Showing that the lessons that most students, teachers, and parents take away from these battles are antithetical to the long-term health of American democracy, she argues for shifting the measure of sex education success away from pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection rates. Instead, she argues, the debates should focus on a broader set of social and democratic consequences, such as what students learn about themselves as sexual beings and civic actors, and how sex education programming affects school-community relations.

Risky Lessons

Risky Lessons
Author: Jessica Fields
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2008-06-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813544998

Curricula in U.S. public schools are often the focus of heated debate, and few subjects spark more controversy than sex education. While conservatives argue that sexual abstinence should be the only message, liberals counter that an approach that provides comprehensive instruction and helps young people avoid sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy is necessary. Caught in the middle are the students and teachers whose everyday experiences of sex education are seldom as clear-cut as either side of the debate suggests. Risky Lessons brings readers inside three North Carolina middle schools to show how students and teachers support and subvert the official curriculum through their questions, choices, viewpoints, and reactions. Most important, the book highlights how sex education's formal and informal lessons reflect and reinforce gender, race, and class inequalities. Ultimately critical of both conservative and liberal approaches, Fields argues for curricula that promote social and sexual justice. Sex education's aim need not be limited to reducing the risk of adolescent pregnancies, disease, and sexual activity. Rather, its lessons should help young people to recognize and contend with sexual desires, power, and inequalities.

Exploring Contemporary Issues in Sexuality Education with Young People

Exploring Contemporary Issues in Sexuality Education with Young People
Author: Kathleen Quinlivan
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2018-10-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1137501057

This book explores contemporary issues in sexuality and relationship education for young people. Drawing upon rich empirical and ethnographic research undertaken with students and teachers in secondary schools, the author asks how school-based sexuality education can better equip young people to engage with contemporary social, political and cultural sexuality and relationships issues. Creatively working across both theoretical and practical contexts, this accessible work suggests approaches to sexuality and relationships education that can build upon the ways in which young people are developing a sense of identity; the ultimate aim being to help them to meet their emotional, spiritual and relational potential. Challenging established approaches to sexuality education, this thought-provoking book shines a new light on alternative perspectives that can help make sexuality and relationships education more relevant and meaningful for young people in a rapidly changing world. This volume will be of interest and value to students and scholars of sexuality and relationship education, as well as practitioners.

Sex Ed, Segregated

Sex Ed, Segregated
Author: Courtney Q. Shah
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 1580465358

In Sex Ed, Segregated, Courtney Shah examines the Progressive Era sex education movement, which presented the possibility of helping people understand their own health and sexuality, but which most often divided audiences along rigid lines of race, class, and gender. Reformers' assumptions about their audience's place in the political hierarchy played a crucial role in the development of a mainstream sex education movement by the 1920s. Reformers and instructors taught middle-class youth, African-Americans, and World War I soldiers different stories, for different reasons. Shah's examination of "character-building" organizations like the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) reveals how the white, middle-class ideal reflected cultural assumptions about sexuality and formed an aspirational model for upward mobility to those not in the privileged group, such as immigrant or working class youth. In addition, as Shah argues, the battle over policing young women's sexual behavior during World War I pitted middle-class women against their working-class counterparts. Sex Ed, Segregated demonstrates that the intersection between race, gender, and class formed the backbone of Progressive-Era debates over sex education, the policing of sexuality, and the prevention of venereal disease. Courtney Shah is an instructor at Lower Columbia College, Washington.

Talk about Sex

Talk about Sex
Author: Janice M. Irvine
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2004
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780520243293

Describes the political transformations, cultural dynamics, and affective rhetorics that together helped ignite the passionate conflicts over sex education on both the national and local levels in the United States.

Great Relationships and Sex Education

Great Relationships and Sex Education
Author: Alice Hoyle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2019-11-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1351188259

Great Relationships and Sex Education is an innovative and accessible guide for educators who work with young people to create and deliver Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) programmes. Developed by two leading experts in the field, it contains hundreds of creative activities and session ideas that can be used both by experienced RSE educators and those new to RSE. Drawing on best practice and up-to-date research from around the world, Great RSE provides fun, challenging and critical ways to address key contemporary issues and debates in RSE. Activity ideas are organised around key areas of learning in RSE: Relationships, Gender and Sexual Equality, Bodies, Sex and Sexual Health. There are activities on consent, pleasure, friendships, assertiveness, contraception, fertility and so much more. All activities are LGBT+ inclusive and designed to encourage critical thinking and consideration of how digital technologies play out in young people’s relationships and sexual lives. This book offers: Session ideas that can be adapted to support you to be creative and innovative in your approach and that allow you to respond to the needs of the young people that you work with. Learning aims, time needed for delivery, suggested age groups to work with and instructions on how to deliver each activity, as well as helpful tips and key points for educators to consider in each chapter. Activities to help create safe and inclusive spaces for delivering RSE and involve young people in curriculum design. A chapter on ‘concluding the learning’ with ideas on how to involve young people in evaluating and reflecting on the curriculum and assessing their learning. A list of recommended resources, websites, online training courses and links providing further information about RSE. With over 200 activities to choose from, this book is an essential resource for teachers, school nurses, youth workers, sexual health practitioners and anyone delivering RSE to young people aged 11–25.

Sexuality in School

Sexuality in School
Author: Jen Gilbert
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1452942226

From concerns over the bullying of LGBTQ youth and battles over sex education to the regulation of sexual activity and the affirmation of queer youth identity, sexuality saturates the school day. Rather than understand these conflicts as an interruption to the work of education, Jen Gilbert explores how sexuality comes to bear on and to enliven teaching and learning. Gilbert investigates the breakdowns, clashes, and controversies that flare up when sexuality enters spaces of schooling. Education must contain the volatility of sexuality, Gilbert argues, and yet, when education seeks to limit the reach of sexuality, it risks shutting learning down. Gilbert penetrates this paradox by turning to fiction, film, legal case studies, and personal experiences. What, she asks, can we learn about school from a study of sexuality? By examining the strange workings of sexuality in schools, Gilbert draws attention to the explosive but also compelling force of erotic life in teaching and learning. Ultimately, this book illustrates how the most intimate of our experiences can come to shape how we see and act in the world.

Moral Combat

Moral Combat
Author: R. Marie Griffith
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2017-12-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465094767

From an esteemed scholar of American religion and sexuality, a sweeping account of the century of religious conflict that produced our culture wars Gay marriage, transgender rights, birth control -- sex is at the heart of many of the most divisive political issues of our age. The origins of these conflicts, historian R. Marie Griffith argues, lie in sharp disagreements that emerged among American Christians a century ago. From the 1920s onward, a once-solid Christian consensus regarding gender roles and sexual morality began to crumble, as liberal Protestants sparred with fundamentalists and Catholics over questions of obscenity, sex education, and abortion. Both those who advocated for greater openness in sexual matters and those who resisted new sexual norms turned to politics to pursue their moral visions for the nation. Moral Combat is a history of how the Christian consensus on sex unraveled, and how this unraveling has made our political battles over sex so ferocious and so intractable.

Sex Education in Schools

Sex Education in Schools
Author: Kekla Magoon
Publisher: ABDO
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2010
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 9781604535365

Examines the issue of sex education in schools.

Teaching Moral Sex

Teaching Moral Sex
Author: Kristy L. Slominski
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2021
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0190842172

"Teaching Moral Sex is the first comprehensive study to focus on the role of religion in the history of public sex education in the United States. It examines religious contributions to national sex education organizations from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, highlighting issues of public health, public education, family, and the role of the state. It details how public sex education was created through the collaboration of religious sex educators-primarily liberal Protestants, along with some Catholics and Reform Jews-with "men of science," namely physicians, biology professors, and social scientists. Slominski argues that the work of early religious sex educators laid foundations for both sides of contemporary controversies regarding comprehensive sexuality education and abstinence-only education. In other words, instead of casting religion as merely an opponent of sex education, this research shows how deeply embedded religion has been in sex education history and how this legacy has shaped terms of current debates. By focusing on religion, this book introduces a new cast of characters into sex education history, including Quaker and Unitarian social purity reformers, the Young Men's Christian Association, military chaplains, the Federal Council of Churches, and the National Council of Churches. These religious sex educators made sex education more acceptable to the public and created the groundwork for recent debates through their strategic combination of progressive and restrictive approaches to sexuality. Their contributions helped to spread sex education and influenced major shifts within the movement, including the mid-century embrace of family life education"--