I think I’ve mentioned before that the Center of which I am director produces a podcast called Ethics and Education which is about… ethics and education. Just to be clear: the producer/director/voice artist/supremo is Carrie Welsh, and my involvement is mainly as a sounding board about topics and how to approach them, and doing whatever she asks for any given episode.[1] I’ll link to a few episodes over the next few weeks. This week: we recently produced an episode about sex education (via spotify; via our website, and here’s a taster on headliner), featuring the authors of a new book about the ethics of sex education by Lauren Bialystok and Lisa Andersen called Touchy Subject. It’s a terrific book, in a series of topical books each co-authored by a historian of education and a philosopher of education. They cover the (often surprising) history of sex education in the US, and discuss much more subtly than in most discussions both the values that ought to lie behind sex education and how to make trade offs with parental interests. You shouldn’t use the podcast as an excuse not to read the book, but it does stand alone well: you can tell that our student producers had a lot of fun finding the vox pops (going up to people cold in the street and asking them how they learned about sex turns out to yield interesting results), and Lauren’s and Lisa’s discussion is genuinely illuminating. Feel free to recommend it to your friends.
[1] I emphasize this because I really think the podcast is excellent, and want it to be clear that the only credit I deserve for that is that I helped hire Carrie and fund extremely talented undergraduates to work with her on it.