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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
pj_wehry:
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host PJ Weir. Can you say it one more time?
lauren_bialystok:
Be all stock.
pj_wehry:
Yeah, stuck. Why did I?
lauren_bialystok:
It's a hard one.
pj_wehry:
the out. Thank you. Thank you.
lauren_bialystok:
Mm-hmm.
pj_wehry:
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. B. Alstok, associate professor in the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. And she co-authored a book with Lisa Anderson called Touchy Subject, The History and Philosophy of Sex Education. She is responsible for the philosophy side of things. And I will say responsible for the title, which I have told numerous people before doing this interview I'm just super impressed by the title. I'm actually kind of mad about it. It's so good that it makes me jealous and wish I had come up with it myself. So Dr. Bielstok, wonderful to have you on today. Thank you for coming on.
lauren_bialystok:
Thank you. Well, I feel like I've already won. We can
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
lauren_bialystok:
go home now because the title is good. I've got to say the front cover of the book is excellent too. And Lisa found this picture in an archive. This is a picture of a pregnant teen standing at a chalkboard in an American classroom in the 1950s with a male teacher in a suit and tie watching approvingly.
pj_wehry:
Ha ha.
lauren_bialystok:
It's a really striking image.
pj_wehry:
Yes, yes. And is that a cross in the background?
lauren_bialystok:
I don't think it's a Christian cross-note, says First Aid.
pj_wehry:
Oh, okay, never mind. I was like, that would
lauren_bialystok:
However,
pj_wehry:
have been just one more. Yeah.
lauren_bialystok:
in other classrooms, I'm sure the irony would be there.
pj_wehry:
Yes, yes. So talk to me a little bit about how you and Dr. Anderson came to work on this project. Why, I mean, obviously the importance is obvious, but why was this important to you?
lauren_bialystok:
There's a few great questions sort of wrapped up in one there. So I had been working on sex education from a scholarly perspective for a couple of years, but even that was kind of serendipitous. So I'm a philosopher by training and I work primarily in ethics and have a particular interest in gender and identity. And I work in an education faculty. So I work in educational ethics and I've been interested in political controversies over curriculum and policy how public discourse about education unfolds. But as well, and totally unrelated, in earlier days I worked at a sexual health clinic as a peer educator for many years. And so I've always been sort of tangentially involved in sexual health education and reproductive rights. And in the province where I live, which is Ontario, there was a new curriculum introduced in 2015 by a liberal premier. And it was, It was a really good, sort of up-to-date, best practices inspired health and physical education curriculum with the components on sexual health and development that you would expect at that time. And unsurprisingly, I now know this unsurprisingly, because this is an entirely universal story, there was backlash. The backlash was not especially large in terms of numbers, but it was very vocal and it got very ugly. And so this action... the time in terms of my scholarship, but this actually presented a strange confluence of my knowledge of sexual health education, my passion for sexual health education, my knowledge of ethics and politics and education policy, and my embeddedness in an education faculty where I had students and colleagues who were researching what's actually going on in schools.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
lauren_bialystok:
was called Touchy Subject, where I eventually had the chance to develop a wonderful team of graduate students who helped me with some research and we did we did some empirical research, but most of my work is is philosophical and doesn't depend on doing empirical research myself. And I connected up with some other wonderful researchers. Toronto is actually this kind of accidental hub of critical research and sex education.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
lauren_bialystok:
But almost all the that I found when I started digging into the scholarship on sex education was done from a sort of critical sociological perspective or social work or a psychology perspective. There's very, very little in the philosophical literature on how sex education relates to our conceptions of schooling, the aims of education, the ethics of policymaking, the politics of curriculum, even though those are topics that we talk about a lot. So I had started working on this world, and then I was connected with the editors of this book series in which the book appears. It's a wonderful series put up by the University of Chicago Press, where they take a hot button topic in education that most people are familiar with and have some opinions on, and they pair a philosopher and historian together to shed light on the topic using their knowledge and the tools of their discipline. I think maybe 10th in the series, there's a bunch of other great books on topics like homeschooling and religious schooling and stuff like that. And I didn't know Lisa, my co-author actually. She's a historian based in New York and we were put together and it was just a really natural and productive collaboration from the very beginning. So here we are.
pj_wehry:
Awesome. And you kind of lay out, you have three chapters that you do here. How much room is there for disagreement? Who's the boss and what are schools for? And I mean, just really big questions, right? Like, and I appreciate that you are handling what are very practical and difficult discussions, but, and you're not afraid of these kinds of questions. Like, you know, what is the meaning and purpose of sex? And,
lauren_bialystok:
Spoiler alert, I don't have a good answer to that.
pj_wehry:
yeah. But even as a, like, this idea of placing pedagogy inside a larger framework is just, one, I think is really important. And I think it helps, even as I look at the framework that you have developed here, create something that at least creates a lot of common ground for discussion, which, you know, as you talk about the backlash that's like inevitably comes, it's just not a real, it's not a common ground issue generally.
lauren_bialystok:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
So, can you talk through your approach to both like legitimacy and pluralism? Like, kind of that first section, how to defend or deal with this disagreement. When you talk about curriculum and then they have to deal with generally angry parents or you know sometimes political pundits that sort of thing. What is the what have you found to be best practices best strategies for that sort of thing?
lauren_bialystok:
I can't speak very knowledgeably to best practices because I'm not the one doing the advocacy or the policymaking. And I think one of the starting points of this work is a certain amount of humility and respect for first of all the people doing the work that I'm not doing. And that certainly includes teachers, you know, standing in front of the students and trying to please innumerable stakeholders. That's already a very difficult job. And also to show humility and respect for people with whom I disagree. part of both Lisa and I agree part of what's gone wrong with sex education debates, especially in the US, is that there's such a quick move to villainize and polarize people with whom we disagree. Polarization is already, as we know, a pervasive phenomenon and it's very poisonous in a lot of areas of politics. So I guess, you know, number one, I can't represent everybody and I can't tell the best practices are. But I can tell you how we reasoned through what might be more promising and, for my side, more philosophically defensible stances. So my entry point here is that there's a certain amount of irreducible pluralism. And the goal cannot be consensus. We're not gonna have consensus on the meaning of sex. We're not gonna have consensus on the aims of education. We're not gonna have consensus on the degree of parental authority. that should be extended to parents, fine. But some disagreement is completely wrong-headed, some positions are indefensible, some positions are simply impractical, even if they have a sort of ethical appeal to them. And so we can make headway here. And part of the reason for marrying and other topics is to show most of us have very little historical consciousness. I certainly didn't know the history of American sex education policy. But in Lisa's chapter, she shows, look, what we think is the playing field now, what we think the options are, where we think all of the stakeholders are positioned, what kind of progress we think is possible or impossible, that's all historically contingent.
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
lauren_bialystok:
We have changed in the past. We have points to lack of consensus and vice versa. We have rallied around common aims that would have seemed radical or implausible at a certain point in history, which we now completely take for granted. So, that should be encouraging in and of itself. We don't have to just sit on opposite sides of the political spectrum here and snipe at each other and repeat caricatures of what the other side is saying. We can actually listen to pick up on your podcast. Here is a great example, right? And we can also come up with better ways of articulating and defending what we actually believe in. Because I think, you know, a position may be right, but it's only practical insofar as you can demonstrate its rightness to other people. And a position can be wrong, but just going around telling people that they're wrong or worse,
pj_wehry:
Hey
lauren_bialystok:
calling them names or shaming them, or dehumanizing them, is obviously not serving should be our overriding aim here, which is children's well-being. So that's kind of the entry point for me. And I'm not going to say what are best practices, but I'll try to explain how we arrive at the better of the options. As I said, I came to this thinking very much about politics and ethics in more abstract terms and not thinking about sex education that can be divorced from other things we know about society. I think that part of what struck me about the controversy in Ontario that I referenced earlier, which was a bit of a catalyst for me to get into this work, was that I felt very, very clear that I supported this new curriculum, as incidentally did about 90% of the province. And yet I didn't feel it was right to shout down the 10% who didn't. I was very disturbed by some of the ways in which the approximately 10% who opposed the curriculum were characterized, how the media covered them. It intersected with other features of Ontario and other political trends at the time. There was a lot of xenophobia and racism, which again shows up pretty often in public discourse over education policy, even when the education policy doesn't seem to have to do with those things. And I was disturbed that, some people who were liberals, who were sort of small L liberals in the sense of pluralism and freedom and so on, as well as more capital L liberals in the Canadian context, were kind of content to let that disagreement lie and to use the force of democratic majority or simply the authority of the government at the time, which was a sitting liberal government to push the curriculum. Not just I agree that this was a very positive step in terms of curriculum, politically I felt there was something missing.
pj_wehry:
Mm.
lauren_bialystok:
How can and how should a government or any kind of advocate or institution justify a curriculum or justify a policy that is not unanimously supported? And furthermore, we're not just talking about kind of lackadaisical disagreement. incredibly strongly about it. They feel that their identities are at stake, that their value as citizens is being called into question, and if they don't see certain kinds of changes, they're liable to make choices that undermine or affect the whole school system, not just their own kids. But they may, for example, pull their kids out of the public school system and opt for private religious schools or home schools in a way that calls into question how unifying a curriculum is. can really be because if the people whose parents disagree just pull them out then we're no longer actually addressing all the students in a generation
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
lauren_bialystok:
in a particular place. So I was interested in sort of the limits of legitimacy and justification. When you make policy, You often have to come down in a black or white way on a certain issue, even when the issue is in black or white. And just applying the litmus test of majority support doesn't seem like a strong enough rationale to come down one way or the other. I mean, certainly there's lots of cases where I'm in the minority politically. And if the government passed a very different curriculum or some other law that I found not only wrong, relationship with my child, which is what some parents feel, I wouldn't as a liberal or a Democrat just throw out my hands and say, oh, well, I guess I'm in the minority next time, you know, better luck next time. I would want, I would at least want some kind of justification that I could respect and some options for how I could influence the discourse and the decision making process, even if I'm not going to get my choice of policy this time. And so I think this is, you know, as I said, a very general issue, like it's a standing challenge in liberal democracies, it's the question of legitimacy is endlessly discussed in the literature on liberalism in philosophy and political theory. And maybe sex education gives us a particular window into these conversations. And maybe part of why sex education is so reliably divisive is because it illuminates some of the limits of thinking that way, maybe liberal theory or the kinds of justifications that would work for other types of politically contentious decisions just aren't good enough here. So, I was interested in thinking about that. And again, I don't have an answer, but I want to hang on to both the importance of liberal principles of justification. So, publicly available justifications for policies that affect a populace, in it who disagree. As well as what have become some of the well-established criticisms of liberalism, or worries about the extent to which it really captures values that are important to many people, and are ways of living that are not indexed to democratic procedures, like family life and personal relationships, right?
pj_wehry:
uh...
lauren_bialystok:
So
pj_wehry:
one
lauren_bialystok:
I don't remember much of your question of that answer, but there's a few things to Bolly back at you.
pj_wehry:
So one, thank you for taking a bad question and making it good. So appreciate that.
lauren_bialystok:
You can put that on rate, my professor.
pj_wehry:
Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Even one of the things I appreciated, and this is something that I feel is just, I wouldn't say missing entirely. I mean, there's been a push from certain quarters. I've had, I think as Dr. Stephen Miller on talking about teaching philosophy to kids. And he had a class on race and colonialism, I think like 20 or 30 years ago. And
lauren_bialystok:
Well, yeah.
pj_wehry:
so, critical theory, something like that. And so, was not even an issue at his school because the parents are just like, oh, that's something they teach. But for him, it wasn't the, and this is just a discussion of what school is in general. And I appreciated, I'm curious, some of what you mentioned here, how you'd articulate it, but this idea of it's not about telling them what to think about these things, but how to think about these things. And you talk about an ethics education in which young people learn to reflect on and articulate their own values. Can you talk a little bit about what schooling is for and maybe even how this relates to the idea of the good life and what we want for kids.
lauren_bialystok:
Sure. So, again, I can only think of coming at it from a liberal framework while being very mindful of those who reject the premises that we're talking about. And the way that I try to argue in the book is to say, if those illiberal or alternative views about the aims of schooling or the good life or what have you, whatever they may be, Unfortunately, they are simply written out of possibility by realities of the world we live in. So, it's not productive to try to translate them into public policy anymore, even if one adheres to those more, you know, bad rock views. So, I mean, from a liberal perspective, and again, the literature on philosophy of education has been working through these ideas, for many years, even in the last half of the 20th century. These have been like very vibrant debates among people who do the kind of scholarship that I do. There's a lot of baseline agreement among people like me that schools should be for endorsing and promoting critical thinking, cultivating autonomy and giving students the wherewithal to determine the good life for themselves as it is at least minimally compatible with kind of liberal democratic order in which other people also have the same liberties. So you absolutely have to teach kids that we respect diversity and that we don't treat other people in certain ways and that there's procedure and there's rule of law and those kinds of things. But beyond that you don't want to be prescriptive and so that means if you're talking about any view of the good life on which there's reasonable Religion, for example, religion and sex often get sort of lumped together as the hot button issues that people don't want to touch with a 10 foot pole in schools. But on religion, you know, we have a non-denominational school system. We appreciate that kids have different religious commitments and come from different kinds of families and communities. And we can talk about that as a describe as something that's descriptive. Now, of course, that, like I said, that's a liberal view. So for certain religious people, and it's not everyone, it depends very much on the denomination and on the nature of the faith and the practice. But for certain people, that is already in affront to their religion. They don't want their religious views to be put out like on a buffet alongside a bunch of others. That their kids can sort of peruse and appreciate how diverse they are. and beautiful humanities. They want their views to be uniquely advanced as the truth, and perhaps impervious to questioning or critical thinking. And they want them perhaps to encounter their kids to encounter other people with respect, but also want to protect them from being taken in by other people's worldviews. view of what schools are for, what teachers can say and can't say, how education policy should follow. So I'm going to leave aside religion now, which is also really not my area, but like I said, I think there's some important analogies here, and they often get mixed up together because certainly people's views on sexuality are very often derived from their views on religion. That's just
pj_wehry:
I'm disappointed. I thought, you know, sex education wasn't large enough. I thought you could just tackle religion in an hour as well. Yeah.
lauren_bialystok:
And also on critical race theory too.
pj_wehry:
Why not? Sorry. Go ahead.
lauren_bialystok:
Well, I mean, in an important sense, and when I pan
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
lauren_bialystok:
out to sort of principles of liberalism and the limits of liberalism, they are all very much of a piece. And there's no, in my view, like, it's no accident that is this particular moment in American politics. We're seeing unprecedented outcry over areas of curriculum and even like down to the books that are being taught that people haven't paid attention to in decades, and that the Republicans in particular have. made critical race theory and what they call gender ideology or various LGBT plus friendly curricula, a real flashpoint of their platform. I think the way that politics and identity and polarization are evolving in the US in particular right now, it's not a coincidence and really you can interpret a lot of these bitter conflicts using some of the same lenses. But I'll stick to sex education.
pj_wehry:
Yes,
lauren_bialystok:
Obviously
pj_wehry:
yes.
lauren_bialystok:
sex education relates to the like and anti-gay and anti-trans bills and things like that. But sex education, as we show in the book, has been a hot potato for over a century. It's,
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
lauren_bialystok:
in fact, it's arguably the hottest potato in education. Like before there was critical race theory, parents were standing on street corners with clackers, getting very upset about sex education. So this kind of has a seniority in terms of curricular hot potatoes. Thank you. Thank you.
pj_wehry:
Yeah, I'm definitely going to steal that phrase hottest potato, but please continue.
lauren_bialystok:
Okay,
pj_wehry:
Yes.
lauren_bialystok:
cool. I don't even remember what your original question was. What are schools for? Yeah,
pj_wehry:
Yeah, and...
lauren_bialystok:
so, right, so part of my point here, and part of what we wanna argue in the book, is that at least when it comes to sex, right? And I think,
pj_wehry:
Mm-hmm.
lauren_bialystok:
you know, religion and other topics I will put on the back burner for now, but at least when it comes to things relating to sex. The idea that we could shelter students, that a unique and prescriptive worldview, and one based on certain forms of ignorance or lack of information, could still be implemented, is demonstrably naive. Even if that were an ideal, it's not an ideal that I've ever had. But again, I'm trying to be charitable because for non-Liberals and or for people with particular religious commitment, commitments, as soon as you're talking about sex or anything surrounding it in a kind of non-denominational public way, like in a classroom or in the public sphere, as soon as you are acknowledging with kids that there are these things that adults do or that sometimes people of the same sex do it together or whatever, you have trespassed on something. So, it's not a view that I share, but I'm trying to give it the same. the fullest force that I can. That would make sex education, as we know it, or at least as the kind that I would advocate for, what loosely goes by the label Comprehensive Sex Education. That's already for Bowdoin. But my point is, that's naive. Even if that were possible 30 years ago, I don't know, 60 years ago, in different times and places, a certain amount of ignorance, prescription, moral, It's not anymore. And we know why. Like if you need,
pj_wehry:
Ha ha
lauren_bialystok:
if
pj_wehry:
ha ha!
lauren_bialystok:
the one word answer is the internet, there's, there's, you can annotate that, you can put a lot more detail on that. Maybe the two word answer is social media. Maybe the trademark answer is Pornhub. But whatever you want to point to, the ship is has so sailed that I think we can only have a constructive conversation about the terrain on which we are. argue about sex education, like the range of permissible views, if we start with an acknowledgement that kids cannot be sheltered, they are not, they already know about sex and many other things besides whether we want them to or not. So, from that standpoint, the aim of education with respect to sex education just practically has to move in a more liberal direction. The question is not, do we tell them? Really not. Do we tell them about the birds and the bees? That's moot. I still think we need to teach anatomy and we need to teach accurate health information and accurate scientific information. Absolutely. But it's not as though if we don't, they won't find out where babies come from, or whatever else their parents are worried about them finding out at too young an age. They're going to. Okay. The question then is, how do we help them navigate the world that they're in? What do we teach them, and what kind of skills do we build, so that they become self-educators and the kinds of decision makers and citizens we want them to be? And we are still gonna disagree. There's no universal we there. But I think we actually have a lot of agreement, and this is something else that the history bears out, and that Lisa and I hammer repeatedly throughout the book. earlier might disagree and I might really disagree with someone from a much more traditional worldview about the meaning of sex. Put that aside, almost everyone agrees that we don't want kids to have unintended pregnancies. We don't want people to get sexually transmitted infections. And we don't want people to hurt each other. Now,
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
lauren_bialystok:
there's a lot more to be broken down there. But certainly part of sex education education and its cousins outside of school and in higher education is about sexual violence prevention and hopefully prevention of bullying on the basis of sex and gender, which again, some people are clearly not on board with because they're energetically trying to impose policies that to my eye are state-sacred bullying of sex and gender minorities. So we're not necessarily all on the same page. But if you really care about those things, if you care about teens not getting pregnant, except maybe in the rare cases where they want to, and about people not getting infections, and about people not raping each other, those seem like actually pretty universal aims, well, we have an enormous amount of data about how not to achieve those aims.
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Bye.
lauren_bialystok:
So, I think, you know, starting the conversation with, you can think whatever you want about the meaning of sex, but we live in a world now where children literally can't be raised in the way that particular worldviews would consider ideal. So, let's be more pragmatic. What do we agree on? Here are some things we agree on, and that matter a lot. Do we know how to educate kids? so that we achieve more of those outcomes, what we do, are we going to listen to it? And the chapter you referenced earlier, which is called How Much Room is There for Disagreement, tries to take up this question of what is debatable and what is not debatable? And when we're not, clearly I think that scientific evidence should not be debatable, or at least that it should have a pretty big place at the table, but it doesn't often. So what's going on there? should be not debatable. Why are we doing that? How much of that is justifiable?
pj_wehry:
Yeah, I mean, and that's, you talk about it being evidence-based, right? I was actually a youth pastor for a couple of years, and so I did some, like even just looking up the most basic statistics, and this was 10 years ago, about how much earlier kids were being exposed to, even apart from what you're talking about, the evidence-based, the idea that, oh, we don't want, you know, I want to teach my children. teachers to teach my children about this. What unfortunately ends up happening is parents don't talk to their kids soon enough and the internet is a far, far worse place to learn these things.
lauren_bialystok:
straight.
pj_wehry:
I think that's definitely, you know, especially when you talk about the negative consequences because of the internet is of course famous for providing lots of information And but probably as we've come all like, you know, we were excited about a golden age of information. What we got was a stone age of misinformation. And so, yeah, I mean, that when you talk about what's happening there why science why this evidence based approach like what you know taking in scientific evidence it's not allow this place at the table can you talk a little bit about the forces at play there like why why does that happen
lauren_bialystok:
I can speculate. I mean, some of this sort of years into political psychology or something, but I, you know, I'm a philosopher. I can speculate about anything. But in the book, I try to marshal evidence to demonstrate this. So I'll give you the rundown of how that works. In the United States, uniquely among affluent Western countries, which is one of the reasons we focused on the United States. I'm Canadian. Again, I know the Canadian context up close. the US that the world really looks to as kind of an anomaly, but also a trend setter. It really sets the discourse
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
lauren_bialystok:
around the world. So in the US since the early 80s, the terminology has been bifurcated into so-called comprehensive sex education, which is usually not really comprehensive, and abstinence only until marriage education. And again, uniquely compared to a lot of other countries, including Canada, amounts of funding into abstinence only until marriage education throughout the 80s 90s. It's really for the better part of the last 40 years and not only under Republican administrations. Instantly like Clinton of all people was a big proponent of abstinence
pj_wehry:
I'm so confused, but please continue. Yeah.
lauren_bialystok:
for the for your listeners who are old enough to remember that. So I mean, and like I said, sex education, advocates and people who work with you have long decried this. This is nothing new. I'm not saying anything new. But abstinence only education, first of all, you know, never had Democratic majority support. This is not what most people, including most Republicans or most Christians in studies say they want and believe is best for their kids. But it's had a stranglehold on policy. Okay. that was not abstinence only was de facto labeled comprehensive sex education, though as I said, what we now think of in the scholarship and in the education world as comprehensive is quite different from what earns that label if you just start with a simple contrast with abstinence only. So we have, I mean the plus side here is we have avalanches of data because it's of extremely concentrated abstinence only until marriage education in large swaths of the US. Of course, it varies by state. And we also have evidence from the rest of the world, much of which was also spearheaded by the US. So, US foreign aid, for example, to sub-Saharan Africa that's been reeling with AIDS for decades, has often been predicated on their adoption of very parsimonious sex education, whether it's absence only until education or the gag rule regarding abortion or whatever it is, not distributing condoms. So we have tragically lots and lots of evidence about the health outcomes and sexual behaviors that follow this regime of absence only education. And the results are it doesn't work. I can put more detail on that, the ways in which it may appear to work and the ways in which it may sort of work locally or temporarily, but doesn't ultimately work. But for the sake of brevity, I'll just say you can look up the studies. It doesn't work. So what's going on there? Okay. To give you some statistics, like in the last few years, the statistics are showing even among American students who've received abstinence only until marriage education, over 50% have had sexual intercourse by the time they high school and that's only intercourse. That is not looking at different sexual activities where the numbers are higher. And 97% of Americans have had sex before they get married. So this notion that we teach them and then they wait until they get married doesn't work for 97% of people anyway. So my question then to go back to legitimacy is, okay, so you look at these numbers, what is going on? rational policymaking look like if we took these numbers seriously? And what does it mean about our supposedly democratic society with the best science and evidence in human history that we are not translating these numbers into policy? So, here's where I'll get into just a little bit of speculation. I mean, I think that psychologically, there's a huge amount of investment in denying what the evidence says when it's inconvenient. And that everybody does this, certainly liberals do this as well. It's not a particular tick of people on the conservative side of the spectrum. It's just that in the case of sex education, it was the conservatives who were pushing abstinence only education. So they've a vested interest in denying that it doesn't work. And I think at a deeper level, and this is again where philosophy may be useful, and I'm trying to give a charitable account people I'm disagreeing with. Sometimes the ends don't justify the means. So, if you gave me statistics that said I could achieve something I really care about, it could be something totally unrelated to sex education, something I really care about, you could get way, way better results, the end that I want. But you have to use these means, like this method, which I don't approve of. Well, I would probably at least pause. I would probably question the extent to which I value those ends and whether I would want to achieve them at any cost. What is the cost of the amount? So, I think part of what's going on is that for some people, even those who say, we want to lower teen pregnancy rates, or we want to boost abstinence rates, I mean, actually, abstinence only education doesn't even boost abstinence rates. saying we should go about doing that, namely something that looks more like comprehensive sex education is so unpalatable to me or so offensive to me that I can't get behind it even if I accept your evidence. No, I've never actually heard someone who endorses absence only education articulated this way. So I'm kind of reconstructing what I think might be going on psychologically. But I think that we need to take that seriously. I think that, you know, living in a pluralistic society, we need to take seriously that people have principled objections to certain ways of doing things, even if those things would ostensibly achieve aims that they endorse. And I think that waving evidence at people or saying, you're in the minority, you're in the minority, look, 90% of parents support this, which has been one of the, I suppose, strategies of the left, is kind of insulting after a certain point, even though I think we should take evidence seriously. And evidence can really be manipulated and used to suit different purposes. So I also don't want it to become a free-for-all, whereas long as there's one study somewhere that says something works, boom, you have evidence and you're above democratic descent. That also seems like a very dangerous path to me. So I think we have to take the concerns seriously and then try to respond to them on their own terms. And again, I think the best way that I can think of to respond is to say, okay, I get that you're in comfortable sex education. I get that some of what I'm proposing, like talking to middle schoolers about pornography, which is what the evidence, because the evidence now is showing that average age of first exposure to pornography is about 11. And that is usually not exposure that is controlled or supervised or curated. That is usually unanticipated, unfiltered in your face, right? Talking to 11-year-olds in some contained and age-appropriate way, but still talking to them about pornography, yeah, that's a tough pill to swallow. But the reason why I think we need to deal with it is because, as you just said, the alternative is worse. And here, I think liberal parents, conservative parents, everybody can, should be able to have a lot more empathy for each other and find a lot more common ground. Because I'm also a parent, and I don't even think you need to be a parent to appreciate this, but why aren't we empathizing with each other more as parents on this,
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
lauren_bialystok:
on this most personal issue, No parents want their 11 year old to have probably fairly graphic and possibly violent and possibly likely misogynistic pornography appear on their device unannounced or on their friend's device in the schoolyard without any kind of scaffolding or preparation. None of us want that. us think that's gonna be good for our kids, even if we're in principle kind of pro pornography, or think that would be okay at a later time in our kids life. The internet has beaten us to the punch. The people who make billions of dollars of profit off of pornography and social media and all these things have beaten us to the punch. So let's get on the same page, let's huddle. Because I think as parents, at this point, it doesn't have to be super political. The alternative is worse, what are we going to do about it? And how are we going to use common institutions like schools to get better outcomes than we could achieve trying to act in our own homes and our own communities?
pj_wehry:
Yeah, if you don't mind indulging me for a second, I grew up independent fundamental Baptist. So I am not independent fundamental Baptist anymore. But this may be going in a slightly, I wouldn't say different direction, but one of the things that I found, and you've kind of touched on this, even as you tried to make a charitable case, like what's the strongest version of their argument, right? It's not that I'm against it. the ends is that I'm against the means and you know and that's a philosophically viable position right? It's at least worth discussing even if it's not normally voiced that way. And a lot of my own journey has been talking to people and I think even but you know this show this whole idea you learn something when you listen. But then, a lot of times, it's amazing to, especially when you're not talking to someone who has written a book on the subject, when you let people talk things out and you ask questions, watching them make their own, answer their own reasons. Because the way that they value reasons are often what's going on there, if that makes sense. And so, the idea of taking it seriously, until you allow them to see sometimes how silly it is, or you sometimes you're surprised by like, oh, that may actually make sense. That's not a statement of how I feel about any of this. That was... I'm talking about the general
lauren_bialystok:
Well,
pj_wehry:
process.
lauren_bialystok:
I really
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
lauren_bialystok:
think that's a great endorsement for using philosophy to think through these issues. I mean,
pj_wehry:
Right.
lauren_bialystok:
because what is philosophy, but trying to patiently and open-mindedly work through reasons, your own and others, and to convert people if you're converting them to different beliefs, not by force and not by shame, but by reason. That's the ideal.
pj_wehry:
Yes, and I think we sometimes we can even quiet people and I think we've all seen this happen. Shaming people creates resentment and that often comes back to you know, even as you're talking about parents pulling their kids out quietly and then all of a sudden what you have is this like growing rift that you won't see until 20, 30 years down the road because you don't have this kind of common purpose or this common ground to speak from. So I'm just thinking through what you've said, and I'm trying to process it. One of the things that I find really interesting, and you mentioned this, and I want to let me say this correctly, you talk about, and I think this is one of the weaknesses of the liberal position in general. And this is not to talk about the sex education. problem sometimes, right? As you're even talking about comprehensive and one of the things you mentioned is that these kinds of older religious curriculums can sometimes be really, be do a better job of explaining intimacy and pleasure. Do you think, how important do you think it is to provide these positives from a pedagogical standpoint and what are some ways of doing that in a liberal framework? Like, is that just an inherent weakness in liberalism? Or is that something that we can look at? It's like, how do we help? Because I think, and this might, without getting too graphic, I think if your sex education is all negatives,
lauren_bialystok:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
it's easy to understand why, not easy to understand, well, why sometimes the transgression of those negatives becomes part of the game rather than providing what, why, like, why is this a good thing? What am I aiming for?
lauren_bialystok:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
If that makes sense.
lauren_bialystok:
Yeah, and I think that's a great question. So briefly, no, I don't think that particular problem is inherent to liberalism. I do think that there are inherent limits to liberalism and how we talk about subjects like sexuality in a liberal public framework, for sure. But I don't think that that's inherent. I think that the way, the kind of tension you're pointing out, the way that some religious or traditional curricula have done a better job of addressing things and that so-called comprehensive curricula have failed, is much more a function of how the playing field has been really, in my view, gerrymandered by
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
lauren_bialystok:
the right. So that liberals, in the face of all this abstinence only stuff, and in the face of kind of heavy-handed moralizing, so that somebody who's not paying a lot of attention would sort of get the impression that the right, or the more conservative people on this issue have moral stakes and the left is not interested in or can't speak to moral stakes. They just think anything goes. That's really distorted the range of options for thinking about comprehensive sex education and especially with all the moralizing and the federal funding and the propagation of abstinence only curricula and methods and so on. The retreat has been to, okay, on the comprehensive side, we're just gonna talk about facts, okay? We don't wanna ruffle feathers here, we don't wanna get into religion, we don't wanna get into morality. We see that this is highly controversial, but look, we have science and we have data, so we're just gonna talk about facts and health and risk. Now, I just have to plug in my computer, sorry. Um.. Maybe you can just cut that a few seconds. And now in the mid-century, as my colleague Lisa,
pj_wehry:
No
lauren_bialystok:
the historian,
pj_wehry:
worries.
lauren_bialystok:
shows beautifully in the book, I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. We think of it as a very backward time and very repressive and certainly sexist and patriarchal values were much more alive and well and conspicuous in the school system. But their sex education or what they called family life education had much more as you put it positive and happy
pj_wehry:
Right.
lauren_bialystok:
aims, right? In the 80s, 90s, until now, both abstinence only. marriage education and so-called comprehensive sex education have inordinately focused on risk. That's about it. Risk. I mean, it's
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha gosh
lauren_bialystok:
something. So, even comprehensive sex education has mostly promoted the message, don't do it, or postpone it, and if you're going to do it, kind of backup plan, use a condom, right? been pro-sex. There's never been sex positive education in a mainstream American curriculum, to my knowledge. That's not what we mean when we say comprehensive sex education. Even if some people think that would be nice. That's not actually what's going on. So why have both of them resorted to this, as you put it, very negative language where sex is scary, sex is dangerous, sex is something to be managed and avoided? As I said, I think the Liberals have done that more strategically because it's been an easier way of combating the tide of abstinence only education, and because getting into the moral debates has proven largely futile. But I hope we can make headway on that. And I think that on the more traditional side, I don't think the message is supposed to be sex is bad. that I've seen in abstinence only and religiously inspired sex education in the US, the message is supposed to be sex is so special. It's so good that you have to wait, you have to save it for your spouse, and then of course it has to happen in the context of appropriate of heterosexual marriage. And again, that's still a little better than saying there's nothing good about it. But psychologically that doesn't work. So, the message that, like, it's so good you have to wait, especially when paired with your dirty, if you don't wait, and you're morally corrupt, and you're unworthy of being selected as a spouse, especially if you're female, because that's also the message that gets pervaded. Well, that's really problematic. But at least they're trying to shine a light on why people want to do this thing in the first place, instead of just, how can anybody possibly do this? dangerous and scary and horrible. It's been likened to the war on drugs and anti-drug education. The message, just say no. Where the no has the force, it's supposed to have the force of shutting down interest in the very thing that we're talking about. And of course,
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
lauren_bialystok:
as you point out, I mean, so just the arousal of transgression is going to backfire, that'll backfire automatically because people are, some people, it'll be like, you know, least are excited by transgressing what they've been told not to do, especially if it's a taboo and nobody's even told them anything about it. But also it doesn't acknowledge like why people do this in the first place and
pj_wehry:
Mm.
lauren_bialystok:
what positives might come if you do it in a safer way. Maybe I'm not saying drugs and sex are the same and I'm not saying like all recreational drugs belong in the same basket here. But obviously humans have sex. And not only... to make little humans. So we like it would be much more honest to talk about the positives in a way that that is not uncritical. Like that doesn't mean 11 year olds should have no qualms about becoming sexually active. There are things they need to know. There are ways in which, there are better and worse ways in which to do this.
pj_wehry:
Yes.
lauren_bialystok:
So I think your question was also like, is there a way of getting the positives in there and still adhering to a liberal framework and also following the evidence public health goals, which do point to more risk avoidant behavior. How do you sort of get the message that this is a positive thing? This can mean different things to different people. For some people, it's important to reserve it for a particular time in their life, for a particular kind of relationship. For some people, it's not important to do that. But regardless of when or how you do it, you should be ethical. You should be health conscious. Here are some things you need to know. There's been a lot of discussion in the literature and among sort of feminist and progressive scholars of sex education about what teaching for pleasure looks like and why it's important. As I said, it's a problem if abstinence only or conservative world, people with conservative worldviews have a monopoly on narrating how sex is pleasurable. We want to acknowledge is pleasurable without succumbing to a just say no or just wait until you're married narrative, you know, from a liberal perspective. But teaching about pleasure and for pleasure is also not obvious. And again, it's not only religious or conservative parents who might bristle at the thought of their child's middle school teacher talking about sexual pleasure. That's not even obviously the kind of thing that can be taught in a classroom format. And this is also part of what that chapter about what schools are for is about. There are very good reasons to think, no matter your philosophical or political views, that some of the most important things we actually want kids to know and learn about sex cannot be taught. At least they can't be taught
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
lauren_bialystok:
in the top-down way that curriculum and schools work.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
lauren_bialystok:
Schools are good places to teach about like anatomy or the symptoms of sexually transmitted infections or things like that. we should teach those things. But there are definitely limits to what I, or I think almost anyone, would want to see come up in a classroom, even if we want kids to learn those things. So how do we get them to learn those things without dictating those things? And how do we get them to encounter other sources of sexual education in ways that will allow them to fill in the gaps that schools can't provide? That's trickier. As I said, the sort of progressive and critical scholars of sex education, there's long been a push to talk about pleasure and not just for its own sake, but because this is really seen as inextricable from gender equality in sex education and sexual relationships. Men's pleasure is almost never really, at least heterosexual men's pleasure is almost never really questioned. Everybody knows more or less what it looks like. is almost uniformly steered toward it. Women's pleasure has always been more taboo, more of an enigma, something for which far more sophisticated communication skills seem to be required because of the way that male-centered sexuality has set the agenda for as long as we can remember. So from a feminist standpoint, and just from the standpoint of sex is in all bad, it's also good, and
pj_wehry:
Right.
lauren_bialystok:
you know, or to sex than not getting pregnant? Like, okay, good, you have contraception. Now let's talk about how to make sex good. There's lots of reasons to talk about pleasure, but it's not obvious how or whether we even can infuse discussions of pleasure into a sex education curriculum. So I mean, I guess mostly what I'll say there is kind of the jury's still out. Like, it's a widely shared aim of many people in my world. But it's not like you can just stand at a chalkboard and impart knowledge of ethical and pleasurable sex to a bunch of squirmy teenagers. That's generally not how that kind of learning happens.
pj_wehry:
I would not want that job.
lauren_bialystok:
No, neither would I.
pj_wehry:
Yeah, thank you. That's a great answer. And that's, I love the optimism. I wasn't sure what you're gonna say about whether this would fit in a liberal framework. And I appreciate that in some ways, you don't know if it fits in a school system, but it obviously fits in the liberal framework. One of the things you mentioned, that part of the reason I asked that, is it really surprised me to hear you say that they anything about like the 1950s and 60s they did a better job in sex education so that that's per reason that was like oh that's that's interesting
lauren_bialystok:
Right, let's figure.
pj_wehry:
but you also talk about avoiding big metaphysical claims and to me that's what a lot of this seems to be about is that you have these metaphysical claims and this is me just trying to work through this. You have these big metaphysical claims that really lead to the kind of robust picture of the good life that people need. You need something that has depth to it, has a full blown narrative, that sort of thing. Obviously sex is going to be a major part of that. Not everyone, but most people consider
lauren_bialystok:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
sex to be part of the good life. Now how that plays out varies very much from person to person. person. And so, do you have any of your own, and I'll try and stay away from, what are the best
lauren_bialystok:
You're not
pj_wehry:
way,
lauren_bialystok:
gonna ask
pj_wehry:
like
lauren_bialystok:
me what
pj_wehry:
the best
lauren_bialystok:
sex
pj_wehry:
dances?
lauren_bialystok:
means in my
pj_wehry:
No,
lauren_bialystok:
personal life, are you?
pj_wehry:
no, absolutely not. No, I was going to try and avoid the practices and strategies question again. I was going to ask, in terms of, you know, you said the jury's still out. What are some promising ways? to approach us outside of a school.
lauren_bialystok:
Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, I actually
pj_wehry:
Hopefully
lauren_bialystok:
thought you were
pj_wehry:
that's
lauren_bialystok:
going
pj_wehry:
a better
lauren_bialystok:
to ask about
pj_wehry:
question
lauren_bialystok:
what you had at school.
pj_wehry:
than... Ha ha ha!
lauren_bialystok:
No, I said there, I mean, there are promising ways of doing things in school. My point is just that it's not a cookie cutter approach to curriculum where you agree on the information that needs to be transmitted and then you stand there and transmit it. That just doesn't work for this material. I do think that we can talk and should talk about things like pleasure in practicing, developing, it's just that it's not going to square the circle entirely on where we want students to get. It has to be more in the spirit of opening the conversation. And as we were saying before, kind of putting the ethical conflicts front and center rather than trying to get the one ethical right answer and just stay on message. So we can and should talk about how even within consensual sex, and we haven't even talked about consent yet, that's another big juggernaut that we're really not sure what the best ways are to educate for, but even within consensual sex and even within sex where appropriate precautions have been taken, like where we've talked about the contraception, we've talked about sexually transmitted infections and so on, there is still an infinite range of experiences positive and negative to be had. You know, the question of what is good sex or what sex means in your life can't just stop at condoms and an enthusiastic yes. But that doesn't mean in the classroom you're breaking down what all those things look like or you're asking students to talk about what's pleasurable for them. What it means is you marry this with the critical media literacy that also clearly needs to happen in sex education so that they're in a better position to critically scrutinize and talk about and revise their views on communicate with potential partners about what are desires, how are desires formed? What does pleasure look like? What are the messages we've received about what pleasure looks like and should we believe those messages? How do we find out what's actually meaningful for us as individuals, as people who are working this out together? I think that's more the conversation and
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
lauren_bialystok:
there are developing practices for that. But that is extremely hard to get approval for. school-based curriculum. And so that shades into what is now called porn literacy, which is also really AWOL on school-based sex education, but there are pilot programs and there are off-site programs to get to your question about sort of non-school-based methods and promising practices. There really are inspiring models coming out of how to get, especially the older kids like example. To talk and think about pornography, sexual pleasure and consent in a way that is not unduly personal and certainly not unduly prescriptive or moralizing, but uses the same kinds of skills and ways of talking that we do in other subjects like about advertising, like, what is this advertiser trying to sell you? What strategies are they using to try to sell it to you? know whether they're reliable. Who is the authority in this matter? Where else could you go to get more information? How do you figure out what your personal values or even you know consumer priorities are as opposed to somebody else's? It's not necessarily that different but I mean you say the word pornography in a school curriculum and you'll have thousands of people yelling at your doorstep. So we also
pj_wehry:
Yes.
lauren_bialystok:
have to get beyond that. Like I said, I mean we just have to have a grown-up conversation. and say the kids are accessing it anyway. you
pj_wehry:
Yes.
lauren_bialystok:
can't shelter them. So what do we want them to think about when they encounter it? What values do we want them to prioritize? So there's this again, and the pedagogy of it is not my area, but there are promising examples coming out. There are lots more online communities and online educators who I think are sort of picking up the loose threads that schools have dropped, which is good, but it's not systematic. So I feel like there are amazing sex educators on YouTube and in communities and things like that, but they shouldn't be having to pick up all of these threads because we should have a more coordinated approach and not rely on a kid serendipitously clicking on something that gets their questions answered or that gets them like a really positive spin to have a healthy sex life. There's still space for that, obviously. I'm not saying we need no hands on deck. Like, we need community educators. We need religious communities to do their part. We need nurses and doctors and health experts to do their part. Like, everybody has a role to play here. But schools are the only place where we have procedures and collective mechanisms kind of ground level uniformity across a generation. And the uniformity, again, is not in the form of this is the good life. It's
pj_wehry:
Right,
lauren_bialystok:
in the
pj_wehry:
right.
lauren_bialystok:
form of there are many good lives, which as I said, I realize is a liberal view that some people find offensive. But there's no other way around it because they're going to know that there are other views of the good life. And they're going to know that there's massive public conflict over sexual politics. no matter what we teach them at school. They don't have to go to school, they're gonna know that anyway. So in a way I feel like, you know, the liberal approach to pluralism has one out here, at least empirically, if not for any better philosophical reason. Empirically, kids cannot get to high school without knowing all sorts of things about sex, as well as probably all sorts of untruths and very disagree. Like whatever their parents tell them at home about their religion or their values or whatever, surely they know that there are other worlds out there. So schools are the only place where we can sort of consolidate and have conversations about how to live together and how to treat each other with respect and how to achieve very modest public health inings. And other places can do other things. You know, the parents can do
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
lauren_bialystok:
their things. The pastors and the youth group leaders and so on can do their things as well. But schools are kind of the best institution we have. They're the only institution we have really for, you know, trying to set up a democracy where people don't have wildly divergent ideas about like when it's okay to have sex with someone.
pj_wehry:
Yes, yes. One that makes me happy. We're running, I want to be respectful of your time. But I had a question about critical media skills. So I'm glad that you mentioned that. That definitely, to me, is one of those missing pieces that people don't often think about. But I wanted to thank you for coming on, Dr. Bialstock. But as we leave our audience here, what's one takeaway you'd leave for them?
lauren_bialystok:
Um, okay, that's tough. I guess I'll, I guess I'll skirt that a little, just go to the one topic that we haven't discussed much, but I
pj_wehry:
Sure.
lauren_bialystok:
feel like is very related and especially for contemporary American listeners is going to be kind of top of mind, which is there's all of this very vicious fighting over gender and kids. And as I said earlier, it's not unrelated to sex that although it's not synonymous with it either. And I do think that we've failed to have sensible, respectful conversations about these topics, and that we've retreated to pretty polarized positions that, again, don't necessarily serve kids. But for those who might want to separate some of the things I'm talking about, like, whoa, we can all agree on lower-interim pregnancy rates, but come on, we don't agree on gender transition for kids. The underlying principles are not necessarily different. And if we don't want our kids to grow up with bullying, with violence, with alienation, loneliness, the things that supposedly, you know, all of us care about, then we need to be much more inclusive in how we talk about sex and gender and kids. not awoke conspiracy to brainwash Republicans kids into being something they're not. Gender has always been throughout all of these conversations, something that kids will experience and bring to the table no matter what the adults are doing. So we really need to have conversations about those kinds of policies that I would hope mirror some of the listening and critical thinking skills and charitable interpretations that I've tried to bring to this book and to the topic of formal sex education. And really, as I also say in the book, we all say we want what's best for our kids. Let's kind of follow the evidence more about what kids say they want and what's good for them, and give that a chance. Too much of this conversation happens with angry adults yelling at each other, claiming that they're doing the best for kids. conversations, I think we are more likely to get to answers that everybody can be happy with. That was not so much a one thing to leave with. That was like a smuggling in a whole other topic as well.
pj_wehry:
No,
lauren_bialystok:
But
pj_wehry:
I
lauren_bialystok:
I
pj_wehry:
think it was a great summary. I really
lauren_bialystok:
thank
pj_wehry:
do.
lauren_bialystok:
you. I mean, what I would want to leave with is like, as we know from many other political issues, we are not doing a good job of talking, listening to each other. But sex education is an area where we probably don't need to be fighting as much as we are, and a good dose of listening and realistic temperature taking of the world our kids are growing up in could probably get us through a lot of this impasse that we seem to be stuck on.
pj_wehry:
Yeah, this idea that these conversations are too important to be dealt with in anger, I think, is what they, or at least at the very least, to be dealt with maturely rather than the sort of like playground mentality that we've unfortunately developed, I think is just a great way to end this. Dr. Bialstock, it's been a pleasure, thank you.
lauren_bialystok:
Likewise, thanks so much for having me on.