An engaging, much-needed new approach to teaching children about the human sexual experience.
Straightforward advice on how to talk to teens about sex.
High school sexuality educator Vernacchio opens the door to his classroom and invites readers in for a closer look at the often awkward subject of teaching sex education to teens. Teens today receive many levels of information on the complex world of love, relationships and physical closeness via the Internet, all forms of media and their peers. However, that information is often incomplete or stresses abstinence only and doesn't help foster a well-rounded, healthy approach to sexuality. With frankness and earnestness, Vernacchio breaks down barriers and gives parents, educators and teens comprehensive, practical advice on all aspects of sex. He discusses the concept of using baseball as a metaphor for sexual activity, noting how this creates a skewed image—in part due to the gender assumptions it makes: "It sets up the idea that sex is a game and that there are opposing teams…it's competitive. We’re not playing on the same team; we’re playing against each other—so someone wins, and someone loses." Instead, he tells his students to envision a new model for sexual activity based on the act of sharing a pizza, which encourages discussion, negotiation and is mutually satisfying to both parties involved. Vernacchio includes thorough analysis of gender identity, sexual orientation, body images, and the use of technology to communicate sexual ideas and desires. Included in each chapter are real questions posed by real students, with Vernacchio's direct and honest responses, which offer more advice and encourage further discussion on the topic. By the time Vernacchio's students finish his sexuality and society class, they are "confident, open, and more secure in themselves, and they know their values." Readers will feel the same way after finishing this book.
An engaging, much-needed new approach to teaching children about the human sexual experience.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-226951-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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