Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality (review)

During the George W. Bush administration, the movement for abstinence-only education gained traction in the United States. Several years earlier, in 1995, the state of North Carolina enacted the Teach Abstinence until Marriage policy, which was “an early movement in the nationwide shift toward legislating abstinence-only education” (8). Jessica Fields’s book, Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality, is a qualitative case study of how three North Carolina middle schools implement sex education during an era of abstinence-only sex education. Two interrelated questions underlie Fields’s inquiry. First, how do educators and students in the sex education classroom conform to, resist, and/ or transcend the aims and mandates of an abstinence-only education? Second, to what extent do the aims of abstinence-only education depend on and reproduce larger systems of oppression such as sexism, racism, heterosexism, and classism? Prior to answering these questions, Fields provides the reader with an overview of the abstinence-only education movement in the United States. Fields recasts the conversation about abstinence-only education from that of an assumed culture war between liberals and conservatives to an acknowledgment that “educational policies and practices” like abstinence-only education “too often maintain the inequities and injustices governing social life . . .” (3).

While Fields starts from the assumption that abstinence-only education curricula “consistently and insistently shape classroom interactions” (3), her intention for studying the sex education classroom is to uncover the ways in which the sex education classroom is transformed from a repressive space into a site for liberatory feminist, antiracist, and anti-bias education. Across the three middle schools, Fields interviewed various sex educators, conducted routine classroom observations of their classroom dynamics, critically assessed both the curricular content and the sex educators’ instruction of the curriculum, and interviewed students in the sex education classroom. Fields’s multi-faceted investigation results in her identifying four emergent themes regarding the impact of abstinence-only education on the sex education classroom.

First, Fields identifies varying approaches in how the three middle schools respond to and engage with abstinence-only education (Chapter Two). Fields’ selection of the three middle schools reflects an intersectional perspective; therefore, one of the middle schools is a private, affluent, and predominantly white school; another is public, middle-class, and predominantly white; and the third school is also public, but working-class and predominantly black. Because the private school was not subjected to the state’s abstinence-only education policy, and given its predominantly white and affluent constituency, it was able to create a sex education curriculum that was the most progressive and comprehensive of the three schools studied. In the case of the two public schools, Fields finds that the predominantly white and middle-class school had greater autonomy than the predominantly black and working-class school when it came to reconfiguring its sex education curriculum to address the abstinence-only education policy. The political firestorm that surrounded the predominantly black school’s sex education curriculum is an example of how abstinence-only education advocates were able to adopt racist, sexist, classist, and overall paternalistic rhetoric to argue that the “crisis” of “babies having babies” (which is coded speech to refer to the predominantly black female student population) demanded that a stringent abstinence-only education curriculum be implemented in the predominantly black, lower-income school.

Fields also finds that the ability for sex educators to equip students with the verbal strategies necessary for negotiating their sexuality and sexual encounters has become increasingly central to the hidden curriculum of the sex education classroom—in light of the mandates of abstinence-only education (Chapter Three). As noted earlier, abstinence-only education policies do not determine the classroom experience. Teachers and students do have agency when engaging in dialogues about sex, sexuality, and the body. However, the liberatory potential of these dialogues, as noted by Fields, is often undermined when educators and students construct a discourse that reifies and normalizes established systems of oppression.

Fields’s assessment of the formal and...