RESPONSIBILITIES OF SEX EDUCATION

Responsibilities of Sex Education

Responsibilities of Sex Education

Introduction

Sexuality, one of the central aspects of human existence, encompasses a range of expression that can vary by historical moment, culture, social or economic class, and even the individual. Its seeming fluidity and scope can make it difficult to comprehend. Closely connected with the notion of sexuality is gender. Gender is a set of stories people tell themselves and each other about what it means to be male and female. Like sexuality, stories about gender vary among individuals, cultures, and historical eras. As with any complex, socially created quality, individuals create and recreate their gender throughout their lives. Sexuality and gender are intimately intertwined concepts in the sense that gender assists individuals in navigating sexual choices, in helping them find others with whom sexual activity may be a possibility. This entry looks at the impact of sexuality and gender issues in education, providing both a brief overview and a more detailed look at the historical record.

Schools Take Responsibility

Perhaps because of the fluidity and possible variation in sexuality and gender expression, societies have endeavored to define norms that are maintained through rule creation and enforcement, individual and group vigilance, and language aimed at reinforcing notions of sexual and gender conformity. In the past, religious institutions, local communities, and extended families upheld the greatest portion of responsibility for maintaining sexuality and gender norms. As educational institutions, particularly tax-supported schools, proliferated, however, they bore ever-increasing responsibility for imparting normative sexuality and gender in youth. This shift in responsibility was most pronounced during full-scale industrialization of the economy, which had as an attendant consequence the greater involvement of parents in wage-earning work outside the home. Schools then assumed growing responsibilities for raising children to the degree that working parents declined it. Schools essentially became important agencies in defining and shaping sexuality and gender among youth.

The significant responsibility for maintaining normative sexuality and gender among youth has been carried out by schools ever since. This largely implicit work is embedded in virtually every aspect of schooling: who is hired to teach, how students and school-workers may dress, what events—both curricular and extracurricular—might be organized, how students may behave with each other and with school staff, and what content constitutes the explicit curriculum. Because the regulation of sexuality and gender norms among youth so pervades the work of schooling and is so deeply enmeshed in its culture as well, members of school communities simply have assumed that this function always has existed and therefore is a natural part of the work of schools.

This ongoing assumption, which is akin to acceptance of the sexuality and gender regulating functions of schools, has continued until persons who transgress sexuality and gender norms have challenged that authority. Over the past half-century, persons who have defined themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-der, transsexual, intersexual, or, to use the broader but still contentious label, “queer,” have mounted challenges to the conventional sexuality and gender order of ...