Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education. In the introduction wrote that ‘to Émile Durkheim, sex could never be reduced to a matter of health, science, or even knowledge’ and that your book is about the possibility he was right. Do you think sex is too mysterious to be taught in an empirical way?
I don’t think I’d go that far, but I would say that it’s impossible to teach it just in an empirical way and this was Durkheim’s point. He’s responding to progressive-era rationalism which says ‘sex is no different from any other subject, let’s just keep to the facts,’ and his insight was that this was a fool’s errand. He’s not against sex education, or teaching the facts. What he’s trying to underscore is that this is a subject that is inherently value-laden and inherently tied to our most profound communal commitments, so to pretend that we could find a value-free way of teaching it, or what you were calling an empirical way, is really a fool’s errand.
Could you outline the major problems teachers face when instructing students in sex education?
How long do we have?
The first and most difficult problem for the teacher is that the teacher’s constituencies don’t agree about what sex education should be. Even in places like Sweden, that Americans often idealise as this kind of sexual utopia. You find Swedish teachers saying, in the sixties, ‘some parents want us to say a lot, other parents want us to say nothing, what do we do?’ So, that’s the first problem.
“The real story in education since the Second World War is that school became ubiquitous in the world.”
The second problem is that schools are sexual spaces and teachers are sexual beings. So, anything the teacher says or does is in some way—at least indirectly—going to address her or his sexuality. The point I make at the beginning of the book is that the real story in education since the Second World War is that school became ubiquitous in the world. This might not have been the century of the child, like Ellen Key wanted it to be, but it certainly was the century of the school. So if you look at when I was born, at the beginning of the sixties, about half of the children of the world entered a school; now it’s upwards of ninety-three, ninety-four percent. I think in two hundred, three hundred years that will be the dominant fact of our lifetimes. The other really important event people will look back on and say was the signal of our times was, of course, the women’s revolution. These two trends are consistent. The major reason that school became such a ubiquitous institution was that in earlier times only one gender went to them. That’s not the only reason—but it’s a major one. Girls flood into schools and one of the things that that does is make the school a sexual space, and you’ve got a teacher there and the natural question on the part of adolescents if the teacher starts talking about sex is ‘is this what you do? With whom?’ That’s implicit in the discussion.
I don’t think I’d go that far, but I would say that it’s impossible to teach it just in an empirical way and this was Durkheim’s point. He’s responding to progressive-era rationalism which says ‘sex is no different from any other subject, let’s just keep to the facts,’ and his insight was that this was a fool’s errand. He’s not against sex education, or teaching the facts. What he’s trying to underscore is that this is a subject that is inherently value-laden and inherently tied to our most profound communal commitments, so to pretend that we could find a value-free way of teaching it, or what you were calling an empirical way, is really a fool’s errand.
Could you outline the major problems teachers face when instructing students in sex education?
How long do we have?
The first and most difficult problem for the teacher is that the teacher’s constituencies don’t agree about what sex education should be. Even in places like Sweden, that Americans often idealise as this kind of sexual utopia. You find Swedish teachers saying, in the sixties, ‘some parents want us to say a lot, other parents want us to say nothing, what do we do?’ So, that’s the first problem.
“The real story in education since the Second World War is that school became ubiquitous in the world.”
The second problem is that schools are sexual spaces and teachers are sexual beings. So, anything the teacher says or does is in some way—at least indirectly—going to address her or his sexuality. The point I make at the beginning of the book is that the real story in education since the Second World War is that school became ubiquitous in the world. This might not have been the century of the child, like Ellen Key wanted it to be, but it certainly was the century of the school. So if you look at when I was born, at the beginning of the sixties, about half of the children of the world entered a school; now it’s upwards of ninety-three, ninety-four percent. I think in two hundred, three hundred years that will be the dominant fact of our lifetimes. The other really important event people will look back on and say was the signal of our times was, of course, the women’s revolution. These two trends are consistent. The major reason that school became such a ubiquitous institution was that in earlier times only one gender went to them. That’s not the only reason—but it’s a major one. Girls flood into schools and one of the things that that does is make the school a sexual space, and you’ve got a teacher there and the natural question on the part of adolescents if the teacher starts talking about sex is ‘is this what you do? With whom?’ That’s implicit in the discussion.