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...novel's title is a clever allusion to Diderot's Rameau's Nephew. Its structure, while not entirely original, is ambitious. Reminiscent of Antonia Byatt's Possession, it uses the same conceit of imposing a fictional historical text upon the lives of contemporary characters and concocting a story to fill in the interstices...
...where parents have failed. But it has been hard for educators over these past few years to know what to teach when society itself cannot agree on a direction. Absent any agreement over what is "proper" sexual conduct, teachers can be left reciting, word for word, the approved text on homosexuality or abortion or masturbation. The typical sex-ed curriculum is remarkably minimalist. Most secondary schools offer somewhere between 6 and 20 hours of sex education a year. The standard curriculum now consists of one or two days in fifth grade dealing with puberty; two weeks in an eighth-grade...
...citizens in Duval County, Florida, have sued the local school board for rejecting a broad-based sex- education curriculum developed by the board's staff in favor of a controversial abstinence-only program from Teen-Aid, Inc. of Spokane, Washington. Planned Parenthood complains that the material in the text is biased, sensationalist and, at times, misleading. Some school-board members argue that the real issue is whether the local community has the right to choose the sex-education curriculum it wants, however flawed...
Late last week a similar case in Shreveport, Louisiana, went against the abstinence-only movement when a district judge ruled that a prochastity text called "Sex Respect" was biased and inaccurate and ordered it pulled from the Caddo Parish junior high schools. The court is scheduled to rule this week on the fate of the abstinence-only text still being used in the high schools...
That's the real issue with the Teen-Aid text at the center of the Florida lawsuit. In making the case for chastity, Teen-Aid has asserted, among other things, that "the only way to avoid pregnancy is to abstain from genital contact" and that the "correct use of condoms does not prevent HIV infection but only delays it." Most teens don't need a school course to know that neither of those statements is correct. How are they going to believe in abstinence if those who preach don't have their facts straight...