>> and the resolution for congress to impeach irs commissioner john kos kin nen. >> impeaching john andrew kos kin nen, commissioner of the internal revenue service for high crimes and misdemeanors. >> we'll review the expected debate with the senior congressional correspondent for the washington examiner. join us thursday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span for congress this fall. next on lectures in history, georgetown university professor marcia chat lynn talks about the different types of sex education used across the country in the 1950s and why such courses have become politically divisive today. she compares sex ed programs in oregon, new jersey and california and explores how they were often used to instill gender norms and racial divide. her class is about an hour and ten minutes.

so my former employer at the university of oklahoma where i worked before i came to georgetown has had a lot of attention lately for a number of reasons. i think it's an interesting situation. so a group of students were caught on camera -- or caught on camera phone, rather, singing a racist song about lynching and the students immediately were expelled from the university by president david borne of the university of oklahoma. is anyone troubled by the singular action of president boren? is anyone troubled that a university president has expelled students unilaterally. yes? >> yes, absolutely. i think, i mean, these things come up a lot in our, you know, quick reaction society where people are robbed of the right

of due process and i think particularly in the university setting we have so much sort of learning and independent thought and sort of transformation going on. i mean, i think anyone would be hard pressed to defend their actions but not to defend their right to due process. >> it's kind of a scary idea, right, that there can be -- that a student can make a choice that has an impact on the community, right, and there are a lot of choices students make in any type of university settings and that there can be such a quick response. one may argue if they had worked at the university of oklahoma that perhaps president boren's response may be a distraction to some other issues that are also happening on campus and that this was a strategic decision in hopes that there wouldn't be, i don't know, deeper digging into the culture at the university that may yield some other issues, but i'm not saying that.

so the question is how do we handle, though, a university environment? what do we do at universities? >> what i think is real interesting is the nature of the video itself because i'm kind of reminded of the donald sterling incident -- not incident but him being an awful person. >> yes. >> i believe both instances they're obviously inexcusable but at the same time it kind of raises the question of if they didn't know they were being filmed -- where does your freedom of speech come into play and, again, like i don't agree with anything that sterling or the oklahoma fraternity did, but at the same time it is kind of a little bit troublesome that you could be saying something stupid, get filmed randomly and all of a sudden you could be expelled or lose your basketball team. >> well, i guess the question is that there are consequences to your speech public and private, right, and that our expectations of privacy can't have consequences in the public, right? but kind of the question, the

structural question of what does it mean, right, when a group of students on a bus on the way to a party that part of their entertainment or part of them like getting their head in the party game is to sing a racist song on the bus. right? what does that say? someone had their hand up in the back. i didn't see. was there a hand? thoughts about this. oh, yes. >> there was a reporter on a navy seal that made a comment about michelle obama and they fired him and it was kind of he made a very like -- i think he compared her -- something like she's out of the planet of the apes which is offensive. he has commented on several famous people. >> interesting. >> so it's like where did that come into play? >> well, i mean, so there is this sense of like what our responsibility s you could argue

that a navy seal, the employer, there is a standard that you do as an employee that this is not okay, but this reminds me of last semester if you were in the class steven solatta who was supposed to be a professor at the university of illinois was fired for a tweet he tweeted out that some perceived as anti-semitic or anti-israel, and the university severed their relationship with him. the question is what are the limits of speech and what are the consequences? as a community can we just hold each other to a standard of being kind of reasonable and respectful but do we need these other mechanisms? it will be interesting to see the types of stuff that unfold. the students who are working at the issues at the university of oklahoma are fantastic. there is a lot of really energetic students who are also saying that there are some deeper questions we have to ask. yes. >> i was going to say that we are also held to a standard now on social media. if it gets out the whole world basically holds you accountable. it's not just like your community, it's all of twitter and all of facebook.

>> that's a very good point. our definitions of a community standard and a community that we could offend, much bigger than the place that we're in. what else? what else is going on? yes. >> i just saw last night, the night before last a resurgence of the black lives matter hashtag surrounding the police brutality of the uva student who was an honor student as well as a member of the kappa fraternity and it made me think about our discussions surrounding who is a worthy victim and worthy face to take up the cause and seems it like even when you google him you can't find -- with mike brown it was he smoked weed and listened to rap music. >> which is like 99% of people between the ages of 16 and 38. please continue. >> this victim we haven't been able to come up with anything negative and it just seems like now is the time -- >> so the question about this kind of -- this moment, right, the university of virginia it has been a rough year for the university of virginia for a

number of reasons and the question about -- i think that this is why i don't like millennial bashing because people who do it are mean and dumb. because one of the things that i think we see throughout these different campus communities is a really kind of smart and very transparent way of thinking about these very issues. one of the reasons why black lives matter and the ferguson movement has distinguished itself historically is that it didn't fall into this trap of this person was a bad victim and we're going to go look for a good victim. that there is a consistency about the question, right, if black lives matter do we have to bracket which black lives. that's what that movement is saying. it doesn't matter if you went to uva or didn't. it doesn't matter if you smoked weed and listened to rap music or not. the fundamental question of the person is about being treated with a level of respect. >> he was arrested by virginia's

alcohol abc and he was arrested for having a fake id. he was in the initial reports it was an attempt of saying even if he did have this fake i.d. this never would have happened. >> apparently no id has been recovered from what i understand, there was no fake id or there might have been. the question is what is a human life worth? let's say he had 100 fake ids with him, right, the brutality of that experience, right, and the scale of these things i think is what's giving a lot of people pause. just a quick side note, last night i was doing a teacher training with teachers in ferguson and st. louis, one of the things that was powerful is a number of teachers said they were not allowed to talk about ferguson until november. so as it was happening there was this deep, deep silence. a woman who works and lives and is from ferguson said just so you know when we talk about rebuilding trust we are not just talking about the police, we're also talking about educators, that teachers also let this community down and the

importance, right, of this kind of deeper engagement and i think that universities are now being called into question about it isn't just about -- come on in. it isn't just about providing a quality education or providing access, it's about a culture that reproduced itself both on campus and off campus. one last hot topic and we'll get started. >> this is not as serious as the others. >> we can use a lighter one. >> before spring break there was an article online, it was on yahoo and multiple websites about these two twins. >> the twins, yes. >> one that looks more black and one that looks more white and how they constantly get confused for best friends. >> so, right, the twins. we will talk about this when we talk about caucasia. so buzzfeed did the one article and because it's buzzfeed it's like here is an entire gallery of people who are related but they don't look like they are the same racial group. what kind of multi-racial family are you? take the quiz.

so the point is we will talk about the optics of looking like one race or the other in the dynamics of the family. and that movie that you saw on tuesday touched on it and just so you know the author of kaucasia was actually in ma movie. she is the one talking about pretending she didn't know her dad or sister when she saw someone from school because she didn't know what the reaction was. all right, folks, the last one i'm surprised no one brought up, you can apparently go to starbucks and talk about race now. so we will be canceling class the rest of the semester and go to starbucks to talk about race. just kidding. let's get started. so for today we are looking at the question of sex education susan freeman's book, " girls go to school" is challenging our notions about the past as both sexually repressed and conservative and the present as being liberal and more open.

and so i think that what this text does and we will talk some more about some broader questions about the relationship between race and sex education, it challenges us to think outside of the box as anytime an adult is telling young people about sex it's necessarily oppressive and anytime there is engagement about sex and sexuality it's always done in a progressive lens. this complicates this idea. so i guess the first question i have for you is, is sex education in the state's interest? why do we understand the public schools as having a responsibility to do sex education? anyone have any thoughts about that? yes. >> considering now the rates of pregnancies it's important that if you're not getting this education in the home the state educate you so at least you can try and prevent these high rates of pregnancies in high schools and middle schools. >> all right.

so they have this kind of preventive task, right, because we understand that there may be -- there is a correlation between unplanned early pregnancies and some social consequences. if i were to tell you that the teen pregnancy rate is the lowest it has been in decades would that mean that sex education is working? >> possibly. maybe. right. so we have to wonder why. what else? is it in the state's interest to do sex education. yes. >> from the standpoint of like is public health with regards to like contracting diseases and things like that, the state has an interest like to make sure that people are aware of like the things that could happen because i think that prevents in the future like having to deal with like a major epidemic. >> so we understand it as a long-term investment, right, in the health of the nation. so it isn't just about pregnancy, it's about sexually-transmitted diseases and we can extend it out to healthy eating, the benefits of exercise, anti-smoking, right,

that the state has an interest in the health of its people. one of the things i think is really interesting is that when we look at where and how sex education is being done in comparison to these models in the book we find that perhaps the past had a more sophisticated understanding about the origins or rather the necessity of sex education than we do in the present. okay. so the states in red do not require sex education at all. okay. and with the caveat in illinois there's some education, it's not mandatory, but you have to do health education and it also says that you have to provide medically accurate information on abstinence. in mississippi localities may include topics such as contraception or sexually transmitted diseases only with permission from the state department of education. in tennessee sex education is required if the pregnancy rate is at least 19.5 or higher per

1,000 teenage women ages 15 and 17. right. so we see this thing that we may agree is in the state interest, right, but the mechanisms in which it's applied are vastly different. right. and that they also are shaped by a political climate. if we look at the states that don't require hiv education, this is interesting. so can we imagine education about hiv as mandatory but education about sex is not? operating in the same place. we will go one further. states where sex and hiv education if provided don't have to be medically accurate. you seem deeply bewildered. yes. >> what is that -- i'm interested in how they pose that question. is it specifically are they looking for the phrase medically

accurate and also the "huffington post" with their articles -- >> so what does it mean about being medically accurate? some of these states have taken a position about abstinence-only education and one of the controversies about abstinence-only education is this question about whether it's medically accurate. so that to say to a group of young people the only way to prevent unplanned pregnancy is abstinence. well, that's not medically accurate. it's a true statement, right, that abstinence is one mechanism, but it is not necessarily medically accurate. right. and so why do we have so many fine definitions about the nature of sex education? right. and the last one, states where sex education if provided must include information on abstinence but not on contraception. so, again, we see the level of specificity in a way that when

we look at these models that have its origins in the 1930s people are not thinking in terms of -- of parsing what it means to provide sex education. that they definitely have a viewpoint and they have a perspective but they are not engaged in this type of definition because sex education had not become a political issue the way it is today. how many folks in the room went to a school in which abstinence-only education was the standard for sex education? interesting. and how many people went to school where there was no sex education? and how many people went to a school where you would say they had comprehensive sex and health education? interesting. how many people went to schools where there was any type of distribution of contraception? fascinating. how many people who raised their hand went to school in the u.s.? very interesting.

okay. all right. and the last one, the states where sex education if provided must include only negative information on same-sex relationships. so we see another layer. don't be ashamed if you are from these states. we are all different. right. i saw some like hiding. okay. so how did sex get into schools? well, the first question that this book -- or the first idea that this book advances is that classrooms in in rooms were arenas in which students voiced consent as well as dissent to the social expectations of mid 20th century gender and sexual norms. so that when we think about the past, we often suggest that people were compliant until the '60s and all hell broke loose and people stopped following orders, right, and i think that's a really kind of dim view of humanity. right. that this idea that young people

were so absorbed with the idea of conformity that they could just accept sex education as it was given to them until the sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s. in fact, what she's saying is she is relationships are more complicated. that even as sex education was a mechanism for a kind of idea about normative heterosexuality, about the family life and gender roles and race expectations that young people were engaging this issue and there were some signs of resistance or some signs of questioning these very ideas. and that sex education was a form of training, informative relationships and heterosexuality. when i think about this book i think about -- someone found this for me a few years back, it's a 1957 facts of life and love for teens, if you want to borrow it you can ask me privately after class. it's everything a teenager should know about life. one of the things that i think is very interesting about it is it opens up about sexual

maturity and puberty and ends with how much a wedding should cost and how to balance the budget in a household. it's this comprehensive idea that adulthood isn't just about the physical changes of puberty and managing a sexual relationship it's about the depth and fault of the family relationship which is the building blocks of a healthy nation. finally it challenges the notion of the past is conservative and the present is liberal. right. when i was a young person back in the late '80s and early '90s the aids crisis shaped a lot of the comprehensive hiv education that in some places doesn't exist any more. people debated condoms in school but there wasn't really a question about sex education. abstinence only education was not something you would find in a public school, it was often considered only part of a religious education. and so the idea that entire

states are now using abstinence-only education as the standard for sex education really does trouble this notion as the present is far more liberal than the past. with that being said any questions or concerns or reflections on this? sex education. all right. we will move on. okay. so why sex education? so at the core of sex education was this idea of gender and how the content and methods are developed are these ideas about school as a place that has forms of gender imprinting. right. what are the mechanisms? what are the ways that schools help reproduce ideas about gender and roles? yes, ashley. >> by determining who can and cannot go together to a school dance as a couple. >> okay. very good. so sometimes every few often on publications like buzzfeed it will be, you know, these students were banned from going to a dance together and it's usually a same-sex couple. what else? how do schools do that?

[ inaudible ]. >> so the separation of boys and girls during sex education, which is interesting because when we look at the film clip of human growth that comes out of oregon, boys and girls together learn the same information, right, but we have this understanding of boys and girls needing to know different things. what else? >> homecoming and prom king and queen. >> okay. the terror that is the school dance. if i were to ever be elected princess or queen of all school things i would abolish dances as the first one. talk about pure and total terror as a young person. what's the purpose of a school sponsoring a dance? >> i don't know. >> okay. anyone want to make a case for the school dance as a productive social site? sure. make the case. >> i will take a shot at it. so it kind of brings those relationships into the public sphere where a school can observe the relationships and

condone them, so the whole kind of notion of like -- well, like -- so like some of the dancing that happens at high school dances is frankly terrifying but you have chaperones there who can, you know, leave room between couples and whatnot and all that stuff. so instead of like letting the couples go to their houses or whatever it's putting it into the public sphere where then they can judge it. >> so it's this idea about mediating the social behavior of teenagers so that if school becomes one of many social sites at the very least there can be some type of monitoring of it. okay. what else? >> i think it's really what he said because i went to an all girls catholic high school and it was the same thing in the sense that we could invite our brother schools over but obviously the girls had their boyfriends they would come over and they would be like leave room for the holy spirit, leave room for jesus. so it really plays into what he just said how like it was bringing private relationships into the public sphere and then

condoning it. >> it's a weird kind of role, right. and i think it goes back to this conversation we were having earlier about universities, right? universities are not businesses, right. we are in the business of forming young minds to be better citizens for our democracy and we have to have rules and regulation, right? i think that there is this kind of awkward space about is this different, but you are all -- most of you are of legal age, most of you are 18 or older when you have this experience so we treat you like adults in some ways but in others this is supposed to be a nurturing and safe environment. and schools do the same type of role for young people as they are moving into critical spaces of maturity. so pre 1960 sex education had broad support because it was based in normative heterosexuality and the family. so this idea that, you know, there could be these broad based coalitions against sex education

this doesn't emerge until the late 1970s when conversations about local control and federal power start to become part of the discourse of school management. now, when we hear words like local control and federal intrusion what does this make us think about? what comes to mind? >> for me personally i think of -- i think of racism. >> yes. >> and i think of like southern states try to like pull minorities down personally. >> so it's this idea of resisting brown v. board of education, resisting federal approaches to school integration by citing local control. the common core, the banning of ap u.s. history in oklahoma, these kind of intellectual and social battles that are waged in the school show us the importance of schools as sites of conflict as well as this idea about investing in kids in order

to make a better nation. and finally what she highlights in this book is that there was no retrenchment for sex education during cold war also in part due to the concerns about anti-communism. that you needed sex education in the schools, that you needed education about family life and normative heterosexuality or the communists would win. one of the ways that communism was framed in the states as negative or bad for business is that communists engaged in free love. there was a deep concern that they allowed for polygamy, that the state allowed -- didn't allow the family structure because children were wards of the state not of their own families. so the investment in sex education wasn't just about educating kids, it was about this idea that kids had to understand that democracy, right, that the u.s. way of doing things was a normative and correct way of doing things. okay. so all of this stuff is bound up

in the sex education at this time. so the question about human behavior and relationships also shapes the 1930s approach where teachers were introducing sexuality as a human behavior and it was a part of good relationships. if you look through this book from the 1950s, they actually talk about sexual satisfaction as a reasonable expectation of a relationship. right? that there has to be sexual compatibility within the confines of a strong marriage. and this was important to make sure that people were normal. the 1950s discourse on normalcy was not only reaction to post world war ii trauma, the expression shell shock comes out of world war ii, ideas about posttraumatic stress disorder come out of the world war ii soldier experience, but this idea about being a normal person, right? what do normal people do in the confines of their relationships?

so there are various experiments that she looks at in this book in michigan, oklahoma, colorado, illinois and d.c. and she talks about these as quiet efforts. so very few communities wanted to really kind of publicize like we're doing sex education now, but that they are these movements that were able to be accepted and replicated and passed throughout the states as communities took this on. and so the models we are going to look at today are oregon, toms river, new jersey, and san diego as three approaches to sex education that are all infused with the social concerns of the community, ideas about race and what happens when you engage young people about sex and sexuality. the secondary goals of sex education are also important to remember. so it normalizes certain human relationships. people believe that sex and relationship education reduced familial decline. what i think is interesting is we talk about the alarming

divorce rate. even though there's some studies that say actually the divorce rate is not unusually high, that if you factor for level of education and waiting until a certain age to get married the divorce rate, you know, plummets, but this idea that schools would then be in the business to make sure that families were healthy and strong. it prevented the gendered impulses of male/female roles. base clie what this means is it helps regulate teen sexuality. it's the idea of the private relationships becoming public, that it could interfere in the confusion that accompanies sexual maturity and it expanded the ability for young people to voice their perspectives in groups and with authority. what's really interesting about this time is that it's asking young people to talk about personal relationships with their teachers, right? how many people had a sex education class experience where

a teacher who taught, i don't know, auto shop or the gym teacher that a teacher had more than one role than sex education? and how many found that a little weird? hands up. okay. how many people found the sex education classes were places where young people could actually talk, like people were very open about expressing themselves about sexuality and sex? >> okay. and how many people had that experience in a mixed gender classroom. that's pretty good. interesting stuff. all right. so we're going to see how it was done before the 1960s and embraces the notion that sexuality was important, right? it was so important it was part of the school day so that young people got a sense that their feelings, their commitment to their relationships, their ideas about connection were also an integral part of their education. okay. any questions about that? or thoughts? okay. so now we're going to look at the different models. so the oregon model.

the oregon model of sex education was to put sex education in the framework of health and science classes in the 1940s, the focus was on the sexual organs and functions within a biological framework. they tried to do animal sexuality to stand in for human sexuality and they said, no, no, we have to focus on the human person. it emphasized reproduction and personal hygiene and provided the model for the film "human growth" which in 1947 was a pioneering experiment in using film to not only teach us sex education but to model how sex education was supposed to operate in classrooms. there's another one called "the story of menstruation" that disney actually produced that is the story of menstruation, but it's the same -- this idea of using filmic representations about talking about the body using cartoons in order to illustrate these issues.

so when we think about the oregon model it's a move from social welfare to sex education. so a few weeks back we talked about the anti-venereal disease campaigns around world war i, right, with the soldiers and the pictures. so a lot of what oregon does in terms of sex education comes from their public health department. so initially sex education was based in crusades of the oregon social hygiene society, the oshs and they were doing the kind of work that we saw with other groups, they were doing awareness about venereal disease, some work on anti-prostitution, health broadly designed. and they entered into a partnership with the american social hygiene association, again, organizations that were concerned about not only the medical impact of sexually-transmitted diseases

but the morale impact that it would have on a nation if people were unwell. and so through a gift from a benefactor ellis c. brown they created the brown trust and the brown trust was focused on the role of medical professionals in sex education. so unlike previous models, they wanted to start with doctors and trained public health practitioners to do this kind of work. that it was too important, that it was too scientific and it was too technical to leave to teachers to do. okay? and here you see a partnership with the university of oregon so you see the university community also having an impact on the way secondary and primary education functions. okay. and so this brown trust is able to bring sex education to a large audience. the film "human growth" was a nationally acclaimed sex education movie produced by lester beck and it is an

incredible kind of way of thinking about the different places where sex education moves. we'll watch a clip from it. so it starts with the family talking about taking a sex education class to showing a sex education class, the teacher showing the movie to the movie audience, it's very meta, and then at the end showing young people asking questions of a teacher about a film that they all just watched. okay? so it's all about showing people how to do this. the film depicts the ideal white family of mid century u.s. so the mom is in the gendered role of hemming the daughter's dress, the dad is doing dad things which involve the brain so he is like reading a paper, the young son is inquisitive about the history of native peoples, and the daughter is just a little mixed up because that's what girls are like, right? so it's showing all of these ideas about what the family is

and how these young people as a product of the family enter the public schools in order to engage in discourses about sex. so curtis avery becomes the head of the ellis brown trust in 1948 and he advocated for the family life approach and the family life approach is you focus on relationships. how to go on a date. how to introduce your parents to the person you are dating. avoiding too much sexual contact in the early years of a relationship. getting engaged. this book -- i mean, it is so specific. it talks about the dates you should go on, it talks about buying gifts, it talks about what does it mean when you get pinned, what does it mean you get engaged, how to announce it, right? so in a sense it's also about a series of middle class expectations for how you're supposed to conduct yourself at the various stages of your life. what are the different ways that

we see today where you learn this type of training? where do you learn this type of stuff? how do you know how to bring gifts to like your boyfriend or girlfriend's house? how do you know about getting engaged? where have you learned these things? you didn't learn it in this class. yes. >> television. >> television. what does television reach you? >> well, the bachelor has taught me it's okay to date 25 girls at the same time. >> yes. the bachelor has taught you -- did you watch the bachelor before we showed you in in class? >> yeah. >> okay. so it's not my fault. next time you are in a serious relationship and you say i'm dating 24 other women you can include me in that equation. >> i will be like i didn't get you a rose today so it's over. >> okay. so you know how to end relationships through either the giving or the withholding of a rose. thank you. where else do you learn these ideas? >> i was going to say i guess your parents, like or family members because i'm always asking people how did they meet, if they are like a good marriage couple.

>> so you identify, right, the qualities that you see as a good relationship and it's this idea that we have conversations about this, right. that our culture is steeped in this idea that one's personal relationship can be instructive for others. i'm sure my single friends really appreciate all the feedback i provide about relationships. mikaela. >> like cosmo magazine. magazines are good for what you should do or your first date or gifts you should get your significant other on christmas and stuff like that. >> cosmo has that? last time i read cosmo that's not what they were talking about. >> they have other things, too. they have a lot of steps for other things, but -- >> so that the industry, right, women's magazines are all about a certain type of modeling of information, right? and it's done in the context of kind of just between us girls, right, or just between us guys for other magazines i'm going to

tell you what's really going on. yes. >> commercials for jewelry places, like jared or even restaurants sometimes they will play off like the getting engaged thing. >> right. apparently in these commercials no one has done anything interesting until they get engaged. i mean, it's like, you know -- and then you watch these -- sometimes -- now apparently there is an entire industry where people hide in garbage dumpsters so they can take engagement pictures. it's really creepy. a student of mine sent me pictures, she said i just got engaged, i said congratulations. she showed me this link because i didn't understand what i was watching, i was watching two people talking, but, no, there is some creeper in like a tree with like a telephoto lens. the idea that we capture these things and we share them, right, and i think that there is an interesting question that's embedded in where we learn this information. right?

so schools during this time felt like they were the best bet to make sure that every young person was learning the same thing. and it created a model for how to use question and answer approach to sex education. so, again, the film is trying to teach you how to ask your teacher about sex. i don't know how effective it is, right, but from her archive we see young people coming up with their own questions, are reflecting about the experience of talking to teachers about sex. so this is a picture from a feature about human growth, right? so it's a classroom watching a classroom of a movie about classrooms and they are looking at -- what are they looking at -- ovaries in this picture. so they are showing who you you do this. this is a still from human growth and we will watch a little clip from this film and

we will see how this was done. so enjoy. ♪ in this tribe the hair was cut in a special style when a boy reached adolescence. >> josie, don't bother george. >> almost finished with that report, george? >> yeah, just about. >> he's reading about indian boys, adolescence like him. >> why don't you grow up. >> grow up? i'm just as grown-up as you are, even if you are older. >> says who? >> mrs. baker. she said that girls mature about a year earlier than boys. >> i suppose that she said you were a genius, you'd believe her. >> yes, i would. >> now, george, i think josie is right in believing mrs. baker, she is a lovely person and a

very good teacher. >> all the kids at school like her. >> hey, dad, here is something for my report. >> what's that, george? >> only the grown people have clothes on. >> say, mom, can i wear this skirt tomorrow? >> yes, josie, i have almost finished hemming it. >> it says here until they were 12 or 13 years old the children wore no clothes at all. the wearing of loin clothes and skirts was a sign of sexuality maturity. >> that's interesting, george. and it ties in with the film josie was telling us about. >> sure does. we saw that film last year. >> i'm on the preview committee, dad. i'm going to tell the class what to look for notice film. >> have you decided what you're going to say? >> i'm going to tell them that the most important things to look for are the changes that take place in our bodies and feelings when we grow up.

>> grow up? >> that is, when we become adolescents. >> wow. powerful film making. all right. so what is happening in this film? it makes you want to watch more and it's available on youtube. what's happening in this movie? what's going on in this family? everyone is so moved by the acting. i know, collect your thoughts. yes. >> they're establishing what a normal family should look like. >> and what are they talking about? >> i guess, i mean, they are talking about sexuality and growing up but in a kind of abstract way. >> right. so there is kind of a sense of abstraction about growing up and

this movie that is all the rage, but what are they -- what are the visual images that they are looking at? what's -- like what other narrative is happening? yes. >> it's interesting that they're using learning about native americans and their culture to discuss growing up instead of using a book about their own culture to discuss growing up which would make more sense to me. >> right. it's an interesting entryway into this question about sexuality about bodies, about who in this culture wears clothes and who doesn't. so even as the family is representing the normalized family they're pushing up against this other type, right, of people that even though they are different, they have the similarity of understanding that one covers the body at sexual maturity but the only way they have an access to this idea of bodies is by looking into this book. i think that this is a really powerful set of images, right, or set of ideas about kind of primitive and refined cultures that then get reproduced in this conversation about the most human impulse, sexuality. right. it's really fascinating. why is the daughter such a disaster?

i mean, this is really mid century representations of girls and young women as being unable to kind of pull it together and really needing the family to help her through things. so i think it's interesting. so going to new jersey, the new jersey approach is very different than the oregon one. it focuses on the role of human relationships and families over the physiology of sex. so it's the total opposite. it's focused on high schoolers learning about dating, choosing a mate, child care, essentially the adult responsibilities of family life, right? that this is not about having a medical or a biological origin of understanding adulthood, that adulthood is about making a series of good choices for the family and for the community. and one of the reasons why toms river takes this approach is that educators are concerned about life preparedness in the

community. they are concerned about the divorce rate, they are concerned about a rapidly changing city that's moving from kind of rural to like mid-sized town, they are concerned about juvenile delinquency. so just like gender structures a lot of these ideas about sex education, anxieties about juvenile delinquency will also play a major role in having sex information. if you remember the book that we looked at about problem women and fallen girls and the maternal home movement, there is this preoccupation about trans guess sieve behavior among adolescents and what does it mean for the larger society that young people are acting out? okay. and also what's an interesting backdrop to the story is this town in new jersey is also starting to form a de facto segregated school system despite african-american resistance to separate schools. so when we talk about kind of what is the normal and the acceptable family, there is also a racial framework that's embedded in this idea of white

families as normative, of the idea that interracial marriage is incompatible with a kind of happiness. if you read my guidebook on life and love for teenagers it talks about the importance of being similar to your future spouse but it also talks about the dangers of same-sex attraction. it frames same-sex attraction as something that happens in adolescence, but something that has to be fought and resisted by spending more time with people of the opposite gender. right? so, again, it's an instruction about what will be the standard for evaluating the person in society. they modeled it after this idea of home economics. does anyone take a home economic course in high school? interesting. or in middle school.

does that still exist? i always think it's something that only happens on television. right. and you learn the basic skills for life. i imagine that no one in this room was at a school where home economics was only for girls. okay. that doesn't happen anymore. okay. so it was modeling about this preparation to be over your own home. and one of the goals of sex education in this context was toward happier homes. right? more stable, more harmonious homes because you understand family relationships. so very little sex education, rather the examples of behavior. a lot of the discourses are harmony, about satisfaction with one's partner was also about the growth of psychology as playing a role in people becoming more self-actualized and better people internally. so it was a psychological function of the relationship to

challenge you to be a better person. they wanted to correct family instability, again, the divorce rate was unusually high in this area and they believed that starting with education it would prevent that. it offered a critique and response to popular culture as well. the rise of rock and roll music of teen culture, a lot of it rooted in african-american culture, was a source of great concern for a lot of white families in towns like toms river. and so one of the ways that sex education or family life education addressed this was to talk about reducing your -- the influence on like suggestive music. so all of this grinding at dances nonsense that the kids do today, no one would have any of that, right? it was about this idea of resisting popular cultures, negative effects on you. comic books also get looped into this as one of the causes of

juvenile delinquencies in mid century. it handled sex on a case-by-case basis because it feared parental resistance. if a student had a technical question about sexuality or puberty they had to talk to their teacher directly who would then refer them to a medical professional or someone else. the goal was not to have a group discussion about sex but rather to talk about relationships in groups. and deferring to the doctor's authority on sexual matters allowed the school to have a sanitized vision of what family life was. family life is off -- i think still used as a euphemism for sex. when i had sex education in catholic schools it was called family life education and it was a mention of sex but really about what the family is all about. again, i like i said before, it emphasized mate selection, right? you want to be with someone who is very similar to you and that

reduced any type of question about crossing racial boundaries. does anyone have a question -- any questions about family life education? queen, did you have a question? >> not about family life education, no. i feel like some of this kind of makes room to talk about rape culture and sexual assault but it doesn't seem like it ever comes up like before college. >> so you are asking like -- or where does that come from or where -- i can't hear you, can you speak up a little bit? >> talk about proper behavior and critiquing response to popular culture kind of sounds like it's -- it makes room to talk about rape culture and sexual assault but it seems like it's never present before college when it's like kind of too late. like do you think it's going to be included at any point in -- >> oh, you're saying currently high schools don't talk about sexual assault or rape? >> not in the same way as like in college. >> i got it. i see what you're saying.

this is a very interesting point that you raise and this kind of loops back to the conversation we had about universities, right? and how universities struggle with certain issues and sexual assault is one of them. the question about where does the education around sexual boundaries, about abuse and exploitation. the idea that they begin at the very moment a young person goes to college i think ignores the very real, right, problem of sexual assault and abuse within the confines of the family and the home. and so in a lot of ways that we see ourselves as beyond this moment, right, like we kind of laugh at some of these ideas being reproduced in schools because we think differently about the family, but one way in which some of these questions about the family never get taken up is how we frame sexual assault as an issue of young people. in this environment and in no other places. right? so we don't talk about it in any

meaningful ways within the context of the family or workplace or the community. so the question is, if a person is not on a college campus and doesn't attend college or will never attend college, how do we then attend to the fact that sexual abuse and exploitation happens in a number of contexts. i think that you are absolutely right. this does not open -- there are very few spaces in which this kind of work happens because a lot of activism around sexual assault and sexual abuse emerged from college campus feminism. right? but what happens when that activism is contained in one place and doesn't attend to all of these other places where that happens. i think that's an excellent point. >> can we talk about the unhealthy behaviors or was it only like the positive, this is what you should do, is it like recognizing what you shouldn't do or what wasn't healthy, too. >> that's important. the unhealthy stuff is like -- it's like having a -- not being

enthusiastic. yeah. so there is a positive/optimistic way of framing behaviors but the negative behaviors of being a social outcast, being too shy, not going to the dance, not participating, not being a joiner. so there is a very it is a very clear understanding how to not only to be normal but be a contributing member of society. >> around normalcy, i think we could also invite conversation about mental health since they made it so broad about making it about health and not necessarily sexuality. i feel that was more forgotten than it is today. >> the whole question about mental health is about attitude. they talk about the way that puberty makes you moody. in fact, your best bet to find kind of puberty is to not be so moody or emotional. how to have emotional regulation to make it throughout adolescent so you can be attractive to other people and they'll

actually want to get together with you. if you look at the story of menstruation, it was all about girls not having a bad attitude about your period. it was like don't complain. like pull yourself together, put some makeup on and go out there. it was this like this idea about not allowing the biological happen to have an emotional impact. what's interesting about it is that we understand adolescence as a deeply emotional period of one's life. right? so there is all of these conflicting messages about the importance of this life stage, but not letting it make you different or derailed. so i think that mental health then gets put within the frame of having a good attitude and shaking it off. so the last one is the san diego experiment. it focuses on education about procreation and guidance for personal adjustment. again, those are the terms use for normalcy, including two new

labels including group counseling, talking with your peers about sex, expanding the grade instruction from 6th to 12th grade. by 1947 they launched the first district-wide public school social hygiene program. san diego was going through an incredible shift in its racial demographic and it was also deeply shaped by the budding military industry in states like california. so san diego is confronting all of these kind of changes demographically and they wanted to make sure that sex education had not only a biological component but also this idea about what the right thing to do is. similar to what we see in new jersey. the rise of the population of color and anxieties about race and gender shaped the messages

that young people in san diego would get about sex and sexuality. it was also shaped by war time industry and post-war industrialization. deindustrialization. you have a loss off jobs with a disproportionate fact on african-americans and latinos. if you remember the posters we looked at about venereal disease, a lot of it is tied to this idea that young women are so overwhelmed by soldiers that they wanted to become pick-up girls. they called it khaki fever, that when young women lost soldiers they lost their inhibitions and they engaged in sex with soldiers and that military bases become this site for robust health campaigns because of the image of the soldier in american popular culture. there was an emphasis on racialized stereotypes about mexican girls in particular and mexican girlhood.

one of the examples that she highlights in the book is this idea that mexican girls engaged in sex or sexual maturity more earlier than white girls. those discourses stay with us today when we look at approaches to either reducing unplanned pregnancy or asking questions about how to use a racially sensitive lens when talking about sex. there is an assumption that girls of color will engage in sexual activity or reach sexual maturity earlier. now some of that is based on issues of diet and access to health care, and others are theories about dynamics within the home. about a decade ago there was all of this literature that said african-american girls have their first period earlier than white girls because they didn't have fathers in the home. right? and this became part of the literature about race and sex education.

that the presence of the father at home helps slow down sexual maturity. right? [ inaudible question ] >> -- because nowadays for all latino women it is all ladies are virgins forever. it is like "jane, the virgin," the show, is based on the set notion that -- it is progressive in a sense, but it is sort of based on the notion that latina women, girls, they are supposed to be virgin until marriage. >> it is this idea that the structure of the family, it is a critique -- it canning a veiled of what people call about "machismo." that mexican fathers have a control over their family this other fathers don't and it prevents early sexual maturity among their daughters.

you see these idea reproduced either in if popular culture or what people say are common sense approaches to public health. that's a very good point. it also listed the support of the parent/teacher association. the parent/teacher association used to be one of the most powerful associations in the united states as an advocacy group. they were able to usher in some of the sex education in san diego. so they called it human relations. which i don't know if it is more euphemistic or less euphemistic than sex education. right? so relations, broadly defined. so human relations was spread across the grade levels which was an interesting idea that you start both young and you continue talking about sex at every kind of stage. a lot of the earlier models waited until high school, but they wanted to do this education from 6th to 12th grade because they felt it would be most relevant at those stages. it focused on this idea of growing up and education around puberty. one of the things that i think is really interesting about a lot of this language about growing up, it assumes the power and the importance of

adolescence as a very distinct stage. so if those of you who are interested in like the history of childhood and youth or popular culture, you often hear about the 1950s as this period of time when the teenager emerges as a separate category of person because affluence allows for more young people to go to high school, delayed kind of responsibilities of marriage in the family, allow for the teenager to emerge as a separate person. and now we take it for granted that we have these periods of time where people are growing up. how many of you feel like you are in full adulthood? like you, this is as grown up as you are possibly ever going to be. hands? not a single person? seriously? okay. how many of you all feel like they are still enjoying the wonderful extension of their adolescence, that your youth is endless, you're young, the world is yours?

hands up high if you feel that way. okay? and how many of you feel like you're trapped between being a teenager and an adult, that existentially you can't feel meaning because of it. okay. so we have a mix of feelings, right? for those of you who don't feel like you are quite adults, which is all of you, what is the most adult thing you are going to do. when does it start? >> i think it starts when you have to pay all of your own bills and you are fully responsible for yourself. >> like all of the bills. >> like most of them. maybe like your parents still pay your cell phone bill, but that you'll be in charge of your rent, you have to make a budget, you have to make decisions at work about how you're going to invest, 401(k) plan, all of these things. you're an adult when that happens. >> may i something that you could be doing all of these things right now. >> i mean, yeah, you could be technically an adult right now. but i'm saying for myself -- when all of those things happen, i'll be an adult. >> so when all of the bills come to your house. not just a little bit. >> yeah. >> we all feel like adulthood is

a series of financial liabilities. that makes adulthood sound depressing. what are we talking about in determines of adulthood. >> paying taxes. >> you guys should be paying taxes already. wait, time-out. so you're no longer the dependent of someone else. i'm just going to leave that right there. we're not going to engage that. i'm not a tax professional but i'm going to tell you this, pay your taxes and pay your student loans back and you'll appreciate that feedback i gave you. yes, when do you believe that you as an individual will be an adult? >> this is more like an interpersonal level. i think when i stop calling my mom every time something bad happens. like when i start dealing with things more independently than like if i only call her once a week, that would be adulthood for me. >> okay. so i think that's a really good point about this tether to parents. because a lot of this human relations family life education is about how to articulate

yourself as an adult but not sever your ties. this becomes very important for understanding the power of the nuclear family. cory, did you have some feelings about when you're goings to be an adult? you have a sense of it? you seem slightly bewildered. >> i feel slightly youthful. i was going to say i think of it more me still being able to relate to my parents on an adult level and not necessarily remaining tethered to them in a financial standpoint or being independent. >> so that you are just like two adults engaging in the world. that your parents help provide the frame of feeling independent or dependent. right? which i think is an interesting one because this is where we start to see the intersection of technology in the personal life. back in my day, no one had cell phones. when you called your parents, it cost money so you called your parents once a week because long distance calling was expensive. you're like hey, mom, i'm okay, bye. like talking to your parents was like a financial commitment so

you just didn't do it. right? also you didn't have a cell phone so you had to be in your room and wait for a phone call. so just the mechanism of access allows for a type of intimacy that i think for a lot of people your age -- i'm like, this is kind of sweet. you talk to your parents. and on the other hand, it's like, well, when does that kind of shift. interesting. anyone else want to make a case for your adulthood is right now? all the hands go down. who is going to make a case for you are currently adult. yes. >> well, i think for me, like i grew up in los angeles so like when i started coming -- like over here for college it was like, oh, i'm on my own if somebody terrible happens to me, my parents are like a five-hour plane ride away. i think when i started college, it felt -- i felt more like an adult in the sense that like i had to be independent. so that concept of like dependence on your parents and having to call them be like,

hey, do i have your permission to do this, can you help me with this, i had to start doing that by myself and relying on other people around me and my own little world kind of do that. >> that's a very good point. idea of distance and forming new communities and forming new bonds. because at the heart of this growing up education, it is about the ability to have relationships. it is not just about a romantic relationship. it is about managing friendships and other responsibilities. so the initial experiment happened at logan elementary school and it illustrates a racialized nature of education. one of the assumptions was that african-americans did not have good role models in their own community, so part of this education was to do the type of modeling that was absent. we still see these impulses today sometimes. it is about like mentoring, someone to look up to. we do this in communities that are traditionally underserved because we just assume that there was no role model or

there's nothing stable for kids to look at. but it makes an assumption about what makes a person a valuable asset in a society and why someone has to aspire to be like them. it also considered change in gender roles during war. so it was thinking about the role that women played while men were fighting in world war ii, and how that impacted the family. when you look at the literature on families in the 1960s the vietnam war, one of the things that happens is, especially for women who are advocating for their husbands who are prisoners of war, they started to find a new source of power for themselves either economically or the family because they became the disciplinarian or the breadwinner, that when their husbands returned to them, it was a very difficult transition. that even though they had been advocating for their husbands to return, they were different people. similarly, for those of you who will spend some time at home

after graduation, whether for a short while or a long while, you will find that the dynamic has changed. you are now a grown-up who's had a series of experiences and now you are in your parents' home. right? and managing those different human relationships was integral, again, to providing a stable society. so the story of how we become alive -- which is like the strangest title -- is how they frame sex education in san diego. it was the emphasis on correct anatomy to encourage disclosure. one of the words was labia. if this young woman knew what the word labia was, she could diagnose her sexually transmit pd disease and get help. it is a slippery slope argument, but nonetheless, the ability to know one's own body is a preventive or public health concern because then someone can seek help. it did use the birds and the bees as instructive. so while oregon did not want any of this nonsense of animal

reproduction to stand in for human reproduction, they actually used plant life and the great animal kingdom to talk about mating to use a metaphor for reproduction. it initially resisted questions and answers. it didn't want to get involved in having teachers answer questions about sex. but as a q&a approach became more popular, it also started to adopt that model. and it moved towards group counseling. the idea of peers talking to each other about an issue. we still see that today. many college campuses use the idea of peer education or peer mentoring as an effective tool to try to either elicit change on an issue or inspire advocacy. the idea that your peers are a source of not only support but information becomes a powerful tool moving forward. so, with all that being said, is

sex education in the states' interest. after learning kind of the roots of it, understanding your own experiences of sex education, would anyone like to make an argument that sex education should not be in the schools? why do we not trust parents and communities or peers to do this work? >> nothing is standardized. >> nothing is standardized. >> you can't assume everyone has the actual knowledge about health and sexuality. >> you also can't control the conversation between children and parents. you don't know if there are any to begin with. >> it is an assumption that you don't even know if this work is happening. what else. what are some of the cases for this? >> it brings up the bigger idea of the family being considered a

sort of traditional avenue where traditional conservative avenue whereas school education is considered more progressive, despite banning a.p. history and all that stuff. i think that's how those two areas are framed. so the school wants to be on the forefront of moderate education as opposed to the family who would be living in older ideas of sexual relationships. >> don't schools reflect the wills of families now? >> yes. >> okay. so it is an idea that the school can provide something that the family cannot. what happens when the value of the family and the value of the school system are deeply aligned? does it detract from the idea of education as an opportunity to broaden or expand one's perspective. >> i think this becomes an issue when the state believes that certain cultures and families

have entangled technologies, for example in the moynihan report, where people feel like they need to intervene to teach people things they don't already know. >> there is this context versus intervention. is it the role of the schools to correct processes that the school deems negative or bad? this is where we see the racialization of sex education where it can become problematic. i'm going to leave you with some images. state of wisconsin in order to make an intervention about sex education started this campaign called baby can wait. it seems like the target is young people of color and the message of this -- which i think is interesting in light of the history of sex education -- is kids kind of ruin everything. so are you sure you want to put yourself in a position to have a kid. now the information doesn't really say anything about

preventing early pregnancy. it just talks about the condition of being a parent. have a baby too young and it will control your life. babycanwait.com. it is about delaying parenthood. but the question is, is this necessarily about delaying early sexual experience or premarital sex. right? it is just this framing of what it is like to be a parent. here the baby has you like a puppet. have a baby too young and it will control your life. baby can wait. and this one again where the young person is under the baby's thumb. there's something about this that's very powerful. there is no move that says babies don't ruin your life ever at any stage of your life. it is this kind of interesting thing that in light of a sexual education movement that is about the privacy of family, that is about preparing you to be the best parent, in order to be the

best citizen, here we have something that says well, babies are a little difficult and it is not going to be that awesome. but one wonders when it is actually awesome to have children. so i will leave you with that question. i will see you next week. have a great weekend. and be good. bye, folks. american history tv airs on c-span3 every weekend. telling the american story through events, interviews, and visits to historic locations. this month american history tv is in prime time to introduce you to programs you could see every weekend on c-span3. our features include lectures in history, visits to college classrooms across the country to hear lectures by top history professors. american artifacts takes a look at treasures at historic sites, museums and archives.

reel america, revealing the 20th century. the civil war where you hear about the people who shaped the civil war and reconstruction. the presidency focused on u.s. presidents and first ladies to learn about their politics, policies and legacies. all this month in prime time and every weekend on american history tv on c-span3. all week american history tv is in primetime featuring programs from our lectures in history series where we take you into college classrooms across the country. each night leads off with a debut of a new program. tonight it is a look at sexuality in america. we begin at 8:00 eastern with a lecture on origins of the gay rights movement, followed by a discussion on sexual freedom in the 1950s, gays and lesbians in early 20th century america, and race and sex education in the mid 20th century. that's on american history tv here on c-span3.

with the house and senate returning from their summer break next week, on thursday at 8:00 p.m. eastern, we'll preview four key issues facing congress this fall. federal funding to combat the zika virus. >> women in america today want to make sure that they have the ability to not get pregnant. why? because mosquitoes ravage pregnant women. >> but today they turned down the very money that they argued for last may and they decided to gamble with the lives of children like this. >> the annual defense policy and programs bill. >> all of these votes are very vital to the future of this nation in a time of turmoil, in a time of the greatest number of refugees since the end of world war ii. >> gun violence legislation and criminal justice reform. >> every member of this body, every republican and every

democrat, wants to see less gun violence. >> we must continue to work the work of non-violence and demand an end to senseless killing everywhere. >> and the resolution for congress to impeach irs commissioner john koskenen, for high crimes and misdemeanors. >> we'll review the expected congressional debate with the senior congressional correspondent for the washington examiner. join us thursday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span for congress this fall. on lectures in history george washington university professor chad heap teaches a class about the origins of the gay rights movement. he describes how participants found common ground with communists, the black power movement, anti-war protesters and other groups fighting against the status quo of american cold war society.