Progressive Sexuality Education ─ The Conceits of Secularism

This book engages contemporary debates about the notion of secularism, outside of the field of education, in order to consider how some "progressives" in sexuality education draw on and reinscribe religious and secular divides. This text will consider the affinities, prejudices and attachments of scholars who advocate secular worldviews in the context of sexuality education, and some of the consequences that ensue from these ways of seeing. The text focuses principally on scholarship in the U.S.A., Canada and Australia.

The focus of this study is an identification and interrogation of the politics of sexular sexuality education. It asks readers to consider their own investments in particular ways of thinking and researching in the field of sexuality education, and to think about how these investments have developed historically and how they shape existing discourses within the field of sexuality education. It focuses on how "progressive" sexuality educators have come to think the way they do, the values that underpin much influential scholarship in the field of sexuality education, and how such approaches might get in the way of meaningful conversations with students, teachers and peers who think differently about the field of sexuality education.

Mary Lou Rasmussen is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University.