When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex--And Sex Education--Since the Sixties

There's a sexual revolution coming to a schoolroom near you, but it's not the one you remember.

When Sex Goes to School explores the ideas and values behind the fight over sex education through the lives of parents, its most passionate participants. Distinguished sociologist Kristin Luker spent over twenty years talking to people in ordinary communities about sex and how, if at all, it should be taught. Luker argues that Americans are now deeply divided over sex, largely as a legacy of the 1960s. She traces sex education from its birth in 1913 to its more politicized modern incarnation, examining in detail the marriage-minded 1950s and the sexual and gender revolutions of the 1960s. She explores how our parents' sexual attitudes have influenced us and, in turn, how our sexual choices affect the way we teach our children about sex. Her conclusions are unexpected, and after reading this book it is impossible to look at the intersection of the intimate and the political in the same way.

"Luker, a University of California — Berkeley sociologist and author (Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood), gingerly examines the issues of sex education that divide communities along political lines or between the competing visions of sex as pleasure versus sex as danger. Luker interviews parents and leaders in several representative communities (she doesn't identify their states): Shady Grove, a once-rural West Coast town where two sides are battling over a new human sexuality curriculum; Billingsley, a Southern agrarian town where everyone is a churchgoer and which still boasts an 'astonishing variety of views'; a new West Coast community Luker calls Las Collinas, which promotes the sex education approach called abstinence only; and Lincoln Township, an affluent community in the eastern rust belt. Many voices express concern that the last three decades' approach to sex education in America, pushed by groups responding to the crisis in teen pregnancy and AIDS, is inadequate and even harmful, diminishing the importance of marriage and morality. Luker reaches back to the Progressive Era in elucidating this debate's roots, and examines the 1960s' focus on management of risk rather than deterrence. Her work is investigative and evenhanded, and cuts through the murk of values versus pragmatism." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Luker (sociology, U. of California, Berkeley) examines the complex issues behind the debates in communities and the media about how sex should be represented to the impressionable young in the classroom. As she conducts two decades of research she finds that although one can easily identify trends and schools of thought, the causes behind many deeply-held convictions go beyond simple politics, religion, and ethnic or gender affiliation. Here the political is most certainly the personal, and generations of teachings work beneath the surface on everyone involved. She traces the issues from the Hygienist Movement to the present but concentrates on the questions arising from the 1960s onward, showing how the obsession of each age is also the focus of the debate and coining the phrases "sexual liberal" and "sexual conservative" to describe those with a voice, quite apart from their other politics. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kristin Luker is a professor of sociology at the University of California-Berkeley as well as a professor at Boalt Law School. She is the author of "Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood," and lives in Berkeley, California.

Luker, a professor of sociology at the University of California-Berkeley and a professor at Boalt Law School, explores the ideas and values behind the fight over sex education through the lives of parents, its most passionate participants.