Caitlin Howlett

Legislating comprehensive sex education curricula has long been believed to be essential to aligning education about sex, sexuality and human relationships with the values of equality, inclusivity and autonomy. Defences of the need for ‘good’ sex education in public schools are contingent upon arguments about whose experiences ought to guide us in determining what sufficient alignment with such values might look like. The aim of this paper is to explore the assumptions underlying one prevailing norm in such defences: what I call parental deference or the practice of heeding to the rights of parents in debates about sex education. The question at the heart of this paper is, then, who in our communities does this deference exclude? I begin with a brief consideration of the appeal of parental deference within theories of education in general, and sex education in particular, before problematising its normalisation through a consideration of the exclusions such deference creates. In the...

This paper interrogates education’s relationship to labor through a consideration of sex education’s relationship to sexual labor. Beginning with a basic question—why does sex education exist as a federally funded project?—I examine sex education’s relationship to normativity and sexual labor throughout its history as a federally funded program. Doing so reveals at least three ways sex education has been and is connected to sexual labor: by its relationship to prostitution and the stigmatization of sex workers, particularly non-white, female sex workers; by promoting marriage, as itself a kind of sexual labor; and by reducing sexuality to a commodity, thus producing sexual workers and consumers. At stake, then, is the possibility of taking seriously the significance of sexual labor to the stories we tell about sex education, the stories sex education tells about human value, and the possibility of imagining a future of sex education that promotes more nuanced conversations about the...

The category of the human has great import in adjudicating the aims of educational praxes, and is therefore central to all questions regarding the purpose of education. Such discussions have been exacerbated within the context of neoliberalism, wherein the subject of education is increasingly seen through capitalist lenses and market logics that become equated with ethical and epistemological systems. And in most cases, the question of humanization emerges as central to the task of disrupting this understanding of student subjectivity. This is exhibited in Educational Theory’s 2015 issue exploring the importance of humanity and the humanities in today’s context. Here, Chris Higgins writes that now is “one of those times” in which “it has become necessary to remind ourselves” of certain “basic facts,” namely the value of humanity to education (p. 116). Or, as Jason Wallin (2016) posits, “For what remains intimate to much contemporary education and educational research but the latent ...

Like so many people, my life is inundated with children. I have always had an affinity for children insofar as they appear to me to be much more inquisitive and open-minded than the average so-called adult, and thus I enjoy springing big ideas on them to see what emerges. For instance, I recently engaged in a twenty-minute-long conversation with a seven year old about capitalism. One certainly could question the way I began and framed the conversation, but, for the purpose of this paper, that matters less than the fact that I was able to sustain a seven year old in such a conversation for twenty minutes and, further, that I learned something myself in the process: that this particular first grader very deeply knows and feels the difference between finding an answer and being given the answer, between learning for the sake of learning and learning for the sake of being right, and, further, understands the sense of injustice that comes along with having educational possibilities limit...