Cultural Miseducation as a Response to Adolescent Eros

• In Event: Curriculum Studies 10 Years After Jane Roland Martin’s Cultural Miseducation

Abstract

This case study of cultural miseducation summarizes the major themes that emerged from a two-year, foundation-sponsored study of sexuality education and the “problem” of adolescent sexuality from the mid-20th century to the beginning of the 21st. It explores how “multiple educational agency”—professional health educators, policy makers, and social and religious conservatives—has framed this “problem of generations” and articulated educational responses to it. Although they differed considerably in how they framed adolescent sexuality, and battled over what gets taught about sexuality in schools, these groups all shared a common understanding of the adolescent body and adolescent desire as a problem that required a regulatory and disciplinary education. The century ended with sexuality education in a moribund state in public schools, but with new scholarly perspectives on cultural miseducation emerging that, I argue, are consistent with a democratic reconceptualization of education and the problem of adolescent sexuality (Author, 2011).
To use Michel Foucault’s (1979, 1985, 1986) language, this “cultural book-keeping” effort is a genealogy of the “truth” about adolescent sexuality and the education of Eros. It is a history of present cultural miseducation that may be traced back to the development of a discourse around the “problem” of adolescent sexuality, especially through professional articles written in scholarly and practitioner-oriented journals in health education, sex education, and educational leadership, all of which organized and framed the discourse on education and adolescent sexuality according to a set of “problems”: “normal” adolescent preparation for adult family roles and responsibilities, teen pregnancy, the welfare mother, homosexuality, HIV/AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases, and adolescent sexual behavior outside of heterosexual marriage. This cultural book-keeping also documents and examines historically the emergence of alternative discourses on the “problem” of adolescent sexuality that re-frame sexuality education around rights, equity, and justice. These discourses were mobilized by civil rights movements representing women, gay and lesbian, and black and Latino/a communities, and by grassroots community activists. In the academy, these movements were linked to cultural studies as a site for intellectual work and pedagogy that linked sexuality to the social construction and performance of identity within power relations.
A democratic progressive re-framing of the “problem” of adolescent sexuality proceeds by un-doing the problem, to reveal the “cultural assets” and “cultural liabilities” in how it has been socially-constructed and how it has organized and deployed power over adolescent bodies and desire. Un-doing the problem means deconstructing it, not doing away with it. A more democratic and equitable society that seeks an educative, rather than a miseducative approach to adolescent sexuality--would still need to deal with the problem of sexuality, as all cultures always have, and some concern for adolescent sexuality and its risks, for “care of the self,” seems warranted.

Author

• Dennis L. Carlson, Miami University - Oxford