The Sex Education Debates

The Sex Education Debates PDF

Author: Nancy Kendall

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0226922278

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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 PDF

Author: Jessica Fields

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2008-06-03

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0813544998

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Talk about Sex

Talk about Sex PDF

Author: Janice M. Irvine

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780520243293

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Exploring Contemporary Issues in Sexuality Education with Young People

Exploring Contemporary Issues in Sexuality Education with Young People PDF

Author: Kathleen Quinlivan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-12

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1137501057

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Debating Single-Sex Education

Debating Single-Sex Education PDF

Author: Frances R. Spielhagen

Publisher: R&L Education

Published: 2013-07-01

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1610488717

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Debating Single Sex Education: Separate and Equal, 2nd edition, provides a balanced summary of the context, concerns, and findings about single sex education in 21st Century United States. Few school reforms have engendered as much controversy as single sex public education. This book examines the history of single-sex classes and legislation that has over time evolved to render the reform legal, even though it continues to be subject to public scrutiny and litigation. The book also provides insights into the social, religious, and cultural contexts that set the stage for the growing popularity of single-sex education over the last decade. It explains controversial brain-based research and addresses the problem of bullying in single-sex classes. Finally, the book includes findings based on research in single-sex schools across the nation. Do single-sex classes work? This book provides information that will allow the reader to make an informed decision about that question. Debating Single Sex Education: Separate and Equal,2nd edition, strives to inform the debate and add to the discourse on this popular school reform.

Teaching Moral Sex

Teaching Moral Sex PDF

Author: Kristy L. Slominski

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0190842172

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"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"--

Sex Education

Sex Education PDF

Author: Kristen Bailey

Publisher: Greenhaven Press, Incorporated

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780737724196

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Most Americans agree that today's teenagers need some kind of sexuality education. But how the subject should be taught is a matter that can cause heated disagreements. This anthology debates the views of those adults who think students should be taught that abstinence is the only option where sex is concerned as well as those who think teenagers need to be taught a more comprehensive sex education curriculum.

Young People and Sexuality Education

Young People and Sexuality Education PDF

Author: L. Allen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-01-19

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 0230297633

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book innovatively re-envisions the possibilities of sexuality education. Utilising student critiques of programmes it reconfigures key debates in sexuality education including: Should pleasure be part of the curriculum? Who makes the best educators? Do students prefer single or mixed gender classes?

Sex Ed, Segregated

Sex Ed, Segregated PDF

Author: Courtney Q. Shah

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1580465358

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.