When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex--And Sex Education--Since the Sixties, (Paperback)

Publishers Weekly,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. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved