Just the facts? The separation of sex education from moral education

Educational Theory

Volumn 63, Issue 5, 2013, Pages 443-460

  Lamb, Sharon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84886928866     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/edth.12034     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Christabelle Sethna, "Animal Sex: Purity Education and the Naturalization of the Abstinence Agenda," Sex Education 10, no. 3 (2010): 267-279.
2. Julian B. Carter, "Birds, Bees, and Venereal Disease: Toward an Intellectual History of Sex Education," Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, no. 2 (2001): 213-249. This work will be cited in the text as BBV for all subsequent references.
3. Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000). This work will be cited in the text as TS for all subsequent references.
4. Cynthia Dailard, "Sexuality Education: Politicians, Parents, Teachers, and Teens," Guttmacher Report on Public Policy 4, no. 1 (2001): 9-12; http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/04/1/gr040109.html.
5. David Landry, Lisa Kaeser, and Cory L. Richards, "Abstinence Promotion and the Provision of Information About Contraception in Public School District Sexuality Education Policies," Family Planning Perspectives 31, no. 6 (1999): 280-286.
6. Nancy Kendall, "Sexuality Education in an Abstinence-Only Era: A Comparative Case Study of Two U.S. States," Sexuality Research and Social Policy 5, no. 2 (2008): 23-44.
7. Cynthia Dailard, "Administration Tightens Rules for Abstinence Education Grants," Guttmacher Report on Public Policy 8, no. 4 (2005); http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/08/4/gr080413.html.
8. David Satcher, "The Surgeon General's Call to Action to Promote Sexual Health and Responsible Sexual Behavior," June 28, 2001, http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/sexualhealth/call.pdf.
9. Douglas Kirby, Emerging Answers: Research Findings on Programs to Reduce Teen Pregnancy (Washington DC: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 2001); and Douglas Kirby, Emerging Answers, 2007: Research Findings on Programs to Reduce Teen Pregnancy and Sexually Transmitted Diseases (Washington DC: National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 2007).
10. Henry A. Waxman, The Content of Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Education Programs (WashingtonDC: United States House of RepresentativesCommittee on Government Reform-Minority Staff Special Investigations Division, 2004).
11. Christopher Trenholm et al., Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs: Final Report (Princeton, New Jersey: Mathematica Policy Research, 2007), http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/abstinence07/.
12. Administration for Children and Families (DHHS), Review of Comprehensive Sex Education Curricula (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2007).
13. Laura Biel, "Abstinence Education Faces an Uncertain Future," New York Times, July 18, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/education/18abstain.html?pagewanted=all.
14. Heather D. Boonstra, "Sex Education: Another Big Step Forward - and a Step Back," Guttmacher Policy Review 13, no. 2 (2010), http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/13/2/gpr130227.html.
15. Barack Obama, "Inaugural Address" (January 20, 2009); http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/ inauguraladdress/.
16. John Santelli et al., "Abstinence-Only Education Policies and Programs: A Position Paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine," Journal of Adolescent Health 38, no. 1 (2006): 83-87.
17. Kirby, Emerging Answers, 2007.
18. Coleen Kelly Mast, Sex Respect, the Option of True Sexual Freedom: A Public Health Manual for Teachers (Bradley, Illinois: Respect for Sexuality, 1986).
19. Santelli et al., "Abstinence-Only Education Policies and Programs," 86.
20. Eva Magnusson and Jeanne Marecek, Gender and Culture in Psychology: Theories and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
21. Michael Billig, Ideology and Opinions: Studies in Rhetorical Psychology (London: Sage, 1991); and Margaret Wetherell, "Positioning and Interpretive Repertoires: Conversation Analysis and Post- Structuralism in Dialogue," Discourse and Society 9, no. 3 (1998): 387-412.
22. Waxman, The Content of Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Education Programs; Kirby, Emerging Answers, 2007; and Trenholm et al., Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs.
23. See Sharon Lamb, Kelly Graling, and Kara Lustig, "Stereotypes in Four Current AOUM Sexuality Education Curricula: Good Girls, Good Boys, and the New Gender Equality," American Journal of Sexuality Education 6, no. 4 (2011): 360-380; and Sharon Lamb, Kara Lustig, and Kelly Graling, "The Use and Misuse of Pleasure in Sex Ed Curricula," Sex Education, DOI: 10.1080/14681811.2012.738604.
24. Sandra G. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991).
25. Dennis Carlson, The Education of Eros: A History of Education and the Problem of Adolescent Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 2012).
26. Scott Phelps and Libby Gray, A.C. Green's Game Plan Abstinence Program (Golf, Illinois: Project Reality, 2001).
27. Lamb, Lustig, and Graling, "The Use and Misuse of Pleasure in Sex Education Curricula," 6.
28. David R. Reuben, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex ButWere Afraid to Ask (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
29. Jen Gilbert, "Risking a Relation: Sex Education and Adolescent Development," Sex Education 7, no. 1 (2007): 47-61.
30. Monica Rodriguez and Barbara Huberman, "Charting a Course to Improve School-Based Sexual Health Education: The National Sexuality Education Standards" (workshop presented at the annual conference of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, Austin, Texas, June 2012).
31. Erin Connell and Alan Hunt, "The HPV Vaccination Campaign: A Project of Moral Regulation in an Era of Biopolitics," Canadian Journal of Sociology 35, no. 1 (2010): 63-82.
32. Nikolas S. Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
33. There are some EB curricula that target certain groups of students who have less access to health care information to ensure that they have the facts that will help them to make the most healthy choices (for example, Be Responsible! Be Proud! and the Spanish version, Cuidate). However, the object of these curricula is to enhance individual choice making rather than to explore the cultural contexts that might support or detract from sexual health broadly defined.
34. Connell and Hunt, "The HPV Vaccination Campaign," 64.
35. Michelle Fine and Sara I. McClelland, "Sexuality Education and Desire: Still Missing After All These Years," Harvard Educational Review 76, no. 3 (2006): 297-338; and Avelie Stuart and Ngaire Donaghue, "Choosing to Conform: The Discursive Complexities of Choice in Relation to Feminine Beauty Practices," Feminism and Psychology 22, no. 1 (2012): 98-121.
36. John Evans, Emma Rich, and Brian Davies, "The Emperor's New Clothes: Fat, Thin, and Overweight. The Social Fabrication of Risk and Ill Health," Journal of Teaching in Physical Education 23, no. 4 (2004): 372-391; and Irmgard Tischner and Helen Malson, "Deconstructing Health and the Un/Healthy Fat Woman," Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 22, no. 1 (2012): 50-62.
37. Adele E. Clarke et al., "Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine," American Sociological Review 68, no. 2 (2003): 162.
38. Tischner and Malson, "Deconstructing Health and the Un/Healthy Fat Woman," 51.
39. Fine and McClelland, "Sexuality Education and Desire," 300-301.
40. Tischner and Malson, "Deconstructing Health and the Un/Healthy Fat Woman," 52.
41. Gilbert, "Risking a Relation," 49-50.
42. Connell and Hunt, "The HPV Vaccination Campaign," 68.
43. Fine and McClelland, "Sexuality Education and Desire," 316.
44. Cris Mayo, "Testing Resistance: Busno-cratic Power, Standardized Tests, and Care of the Self," Educational Philosophy and Theory 37, no. 3 (2005): 358. See also James Marshall, Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1996), 192 (emphasis added).
45. The alternative to "teaching to the test" that I describe here is more in line with Foucault's "technologies of the self" and would permit adolescents to reflect on and transform themselves in order to attain happiness, or wisdom. See Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
46. Barbara Krahé et al., "Childhood Sexual Abuse and Revictimization in Adolescence," Child Abuse and Neglect 23, no. 4 (1999): 383-394.
47. Sharon Lamb et al., Sexual Ethics for a Caring Society: Curriculum (SECS-C), last modified August 30, 2012, http://sexandethics.org.
48. Jen Gilbert, "Literature as Sex Education," Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 11, no. 2 (2004): 233-241.
49. Claudia Card, "Against Marriage and Motherhood," Hypatia 11, no. 3 (1996): 1-17, http://pol285.blog.gustavus.edu/files/2009/08/Card_Against_Marriage.pdf.
50. See Cris Mayo, "Unsettled Relations: Schools, Gay Marriage, and Educating for Sexuality," in this issue.
51. Here, I refer to the notion of mutuality as outlined in Sharon Lamb, "Toward a Sexual Ethics Curriculum: Bringing Philosophy and Society to Bear on Individual Development," Harvard Educational Review 80, no. 1 (2010): 81-105; and Moira Carmody, "Ethical Erotics: Reconceptualizing Anti-Rape Education," Sexualities 8, no. 4 (2005): 465-480.
52. Jane D. Brown, Carolyn Tucker Halpern, and Kelly Ladin L'Engle, "Mass Media as a Sexual Super Peer for Early Maturing Girls," Journal of Adolescent Health 36, no. 5 (2005): 420-427.
53. Robert Kunzman, Grappling with the Good: Talking About Religion and Morality in Public Schools (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).
54. Mary Lou Rasmussen, "Secularism, Religion, and 'Progressive' Sex Education," Sexualities 13, no. 6 (2010): 699-712.
55. Kunzman, Grappling with the Good, 116.
56. In his contribution to this symposium, Josh Corngold argues that the promotion of personal autonomy should be a major aim of sex education. Paula McAvoy offers a very different perspective. See Josh Corngold, "Moral Pluralism and Sex Education," and Paula McAvoy, "The Aims of Sex Education: Demoting Autonomy and Promoting Mutuality," both in this issue.