Too Hot to Handle
-
Jonathan Zimmerman
About this book
The first comprehensive history of sex education around the world
Too Hot to Handle is the first truly international history of sex education. As Jonathan Zimmerman shows, the controversial subject began in the West and spread steadily around the world over the past century. As people crossed borders, however, they joined hands to block sex education from most of their classrooms. Examining key players who supported and opposed the sex education movement, Zimmerman takes a close look at one of the most debated and divisive hallmarks of modern schooling.
In the early 1900s, the United States pioneered sex education to protect citizens from venereal disease. But the American approach came under fire after World War II from European countries, which valued individual rights and pleasures over social goals and outcomes. In the so-called Third World, sex education developed in response to the deadly crisis of HIV/AIDS. By the early 2000s, nearly every country in the world addressed sex in its official school curriculum. Still, Zimmerman demonstrates that sex education never won a sustained foothold: parents and religious leaders rejected the subject as an intrusion on their authority, while teachers and principals worried that it would undermine their own tenuous powers. Despite the overall liberalization of sexual attitudes, opposition to sex education increased as the century unfolded. Into the present, it remains a subject without a home.
Too Hot to Handle presents the stormy development and dilemmas of school-based sex education in the modern world.
Author / Editor information
Reviews
Zimmerman's rich book is a history of schools and education as much as it is a history of sex. It brings a curiously fresh approach
to accounts of sex education. . . . A major new account of a topic that has received some considerable attention in past decades of historical scholarship.
Topics
-
Download PDFPublicly Available
Frontmatter
i -
Download PDFPublicly Available
CONTENTS
vii -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Acknowledgments
ix -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Introduction. The Century of School, and the Century of Sex
1 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Chapter One. The Birds, the Bees, and the Globe
14 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Chapter Two. A Family of Man?
49 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Chapter Three. Sex Education and the “Sexual Revolution,” 1965– 83
80 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Chapter Four. A Right to Knowledge? Culture, Diversity, and Sex Education in the Age if AIDS, 1984– 2010
115 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Conclusion. a Mirror, Not a Spearhead: Sex Education and the Limits of School
144 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Notes
153 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Manuscript Collections
193 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Index
197
