Educating children and adolescents in public schools about sex is a deeply inflammatory act in the United States. Since the 1980s, intense political and cultural battles have been waged between believers in abstinence until marriage and advocates for comprehensive sex education. In The Sex Education Debates, Nancy Kendall upends conventional thinking about these battles by bringing the school and community realities of sex education to life through the diverse voices of students, teachers, administrators, and activists.

Drawing on ethnographic research in five states, Kendall reveals important differences and surprising commonalities shared by purported antagonists in the sex education wars, and she illuminates the unintended consequences these protracted battles have, especially on teachers and students. Showing that the lessons that most students, teachers, and parents take away from these battles are antithetical to the long-term health of American democracy, she argues for shifting the measure of sex education success away from pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection rates. Instead, she argues, the debates should focus on a broader set of social and democratic consequences, such as what students learn about themselves as sexual beings and civic actors, and how sex education programming affects school-community relations.

“The Sex Education Debates is a comprehensive analysis of US sex education debates, policies, and classroom practice. As Nancy Kendall argues, debates, policy, and practice vary greatly across state and local contexts, and those variations have enormous consequences for teachers’, students’, and communities’ experiences of teaching and learning about sexuality. With incisive readings of the field data, she offers a rigorous engagement with issues of structural and other social inequalities. Her analysis makes a significant contribution.”

“The Sex Education Debates is one of the most nuanced and insightful analyses of a controversy that lies at the heart of the ideological conflicts that pervade education. Nancy Kendall has written a book that challenges us both to rethink the sex education controversy and to create educational programs that deal honestly with the realities that educators, communities, and especially students face. It is crucial reading for anyone involved in policy and practice in education.”

“The Sex Education Debates is an original and wide-ranging book that makes noteworthy contributions to understandings of the politics and practices of the most prevalent approaches to sex education in the contemporary United States. Comprised of both description and interpretation of sex education policy and practice in four states, it elucidates guiding ideological assumptions while illuminating students’ misconceptions of sex and sexuality and the questionable information that is routinely pedaled to them by teachers who are ill-prepared, overly ideological, and, above all, anxious.”

“Kendall provides a comprehensive examination of how policy and societal beliefs shape the discourse and practice of sex education in five states through intensive interviews and immersion in comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) and Abstinence Only until Marriage Education (AOUME) initiatives. Her in-depth ethnographic research details the lived realities of students, illustrates the anxiety of many ill-prepared teachers, and points out discrepancies in teaching methods as well as the shortcomings of current curricula.”