Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality (review)

Jessica Fields' Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality provides important new insights into how sex education policies affect — and fail to affect — students in public and private schools in the United States. Despite continuing and heated national, state and local debates concerning official sex education policies, our knowledge of what happens inside of sex education classrooms in public schools is quite limited, due in part to the increasing difficulty that researchers face in gaining access to schools and students (Fields and Tolman 2006). Fields' book, which is based on extensive fieldwork conducted in one private and two public schools in North Carolina, addresses this significant gap. It is perhaps particularly informative to our understanding of state and national debates about sex education because North Carolina's "Teach Abstinence Until Marriage" policy helped inform the federal funding for abstinence-only education that began in 1996.

Unlike many traditional policy studies, Field's work rapidly moves beyond a textual or political analysis of official policy to explore how such policies are adopted, adapted, rejected and otherwise transformed in daily practice. Fields' account is based on analyses of debates about the state's policy; observations of school board meetings and classrooms; and interviews with a wide range of actors, including school board officials, parents, teachers and students at the three schools. Fields is able, therefore, to present a careful analysis of how different actors influence official policy and actual classroom-level sex education practices.

The three-school comparative research design allows Fields to explore in greater detail than has been done in other studies the similarities and differences that exist in the educational experiences of a range of students. The private school's largely white, middle-class student body receives a 13-week, comprehensive, coeducational sex education course. One of the public school's largely white, low-income student body receives a four-day, abstinence-only, single-sex sex education course. The second public school's largely black, low-income student body receives a two- to three-week, comprehensive, co-educational sex education course. This comparative frame provides Fields with leverage to talk about the intersections of race, class, gender and policy practices in ways that few studies have been able to do previously.

Indeed, Fields' analysis of sex education practices in the three schools is a refreshing change from what she rightly identifies as a stultifying debate over whether comprehensive or abstinence-only education best serves to lower teen pregnancy and STD rates. She argues that we should instead be asking whether and how current sex education models serve to perpetuate or interrupt sexual and social injustice, and how sex education might "...create classroom environments in which students and teachers listen to one another out of a commitment to recognizing and contending with sexual desires, power and inequality."(36) She pursues these goals through an in-depth exploration of three themes that arose across the sex education classrooms that she observed: (1. the role that communication is expected to play in securing sexual health; (2. the images of female and male bodies and relationships presented in curricular materials; and (3. ideas about how knowledge of sex and sexuality are and should be related by adults to students and by students to students in sex education classrooms.

Across these themes, Fields highlights the formal, hidden and evaded curricular messages that students in the two public schools receive about race, class, sexuality and, most of all, gender relations. She demonstrates that these messages remain highly inequitable, largely because they fail to engage in honest discussion about the structured inequality and power relations that shape students' daily lives and sexual experiences. Fields' analysis builds on previous studies concerning the lack of space for discussions of female desire, and opens up new and important paths for understanding the gendered, raced and classed effects of public schools' sex education practices on students. For example, she provides insightful commentary on observations from her research including: teachers' silence following girls' comments that open sexual communication...