The cases analyzed in this essay exemplify both the influence of the sexual revolution and the conservative backlash against it. Topics that were once considered obscene were now seen as educational. Without this greater openness, none of these court cases would have been possible. In fact, people fighting against censorship and repression…

The sensitive question of whether censorship is permissible in the classroom has not been effectively explored, nor has there been an exhaustive survey of all occurrences of public censorship in schools. Through tracking all public occurrences, this article seeks to understand whether censorship is ever justified in both the English classroom and…

This article begins with a broad historical overview detailing how school-based sexuality education has been taught from a specific kind of heterosexual perspective that has excluded lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identified (LGBTQ) students as well as heterosexual students who do not fall along culturally dominant heterosexual…

For over a decade, battles have raged between conservative Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) sexuality education advocates and liberal Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) advocates. While these battles have focused on the inclusion of health information about contraception and whether or not a curriculum must advocate abstinence as the…

Throughout history, a society's economic and power relations and the resulting division into unequal strata have strongly influenced the system of information flow.1 Every civilization has generated its own information system, which functions to foster the integration of society, to standardize its values, and, in the long run, to legitimate the…

A review of literature on sex education in the schools traces the changing opinions and attitudes on the subject over the past century. Early sex education efforts (1880s to 1920s) in the schools focused upon the repression of sexual activity, the prevention of immorality, hygiene, and prevention of venereal diseases. A gradual movement (1940s to…