ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses one of the earliest considerations of sex education in philosophy of education, published in 1989. It also considers the implications of feminist perspectives on gender, sexuality, and education for sex education as a topic and/or subject in curriculum. People understand themselves and relate to others in ways that depend significantly on their sense of sexuality. Sexual understandings, according to Jeffrey Weeks, provide individuals with “a sense of personal unity, social location, and even at times political commitment”. In decades sexuality has been subjected to more environmentalist analyses than in the past. As Marxists have sought to expose much of human life as constructed contingently upon variable systems of labour, so feminists try to show the social contingency of patterns of human relations which appear to rest naturally upon sex. The labouring and sexual dimensions of personal identity and social life both are claimed by MacKinnon to depend upong social factors.