The Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join us for a conversation with Jonathan Zimmerman, Barron Lerner, Ritty Lukose, and Perry Halkitis about Zimmerman's new book, Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education.

Too Hot to Handle is the first truly international history of sex education. As Jonathan Zimmerman shows, the controversial subject began in the West and spread steadily around the world over the past century. As people crossed borders, however, they joined hands to block sex education from most of their classrooms. Examining key players who supported and opposed the sex education movement, Zimmerman takes a close look at one of the most debated and divisive hallmarks of modern schooling.

In the early 1900s, the United States pioneered sex education to protect citizens from venereal disease. But the American approach came under fire after World War II from European countries, which valued individual rights and pleasures over social goals and outcomes. In the so-called Third World, sex education developed in response to the deadly crisis of HIV/AIDS. By the early 2000s, nearly every country in the world addressed sex in its official school curriculum. Still, Zimmerman demonstrates that sex education never won a sustained foothold: parents and religious leaders rejected the subject as an intrusion on their authority, while teachers and principals worried that it would undermine their own tenuous powers. Despite the overall liberalization of sexual attitudes, opposition to sex education increased as the century unfolded. Into the present, it remains a subject without a home.

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at New York University. His research has focused on the ways that state schools shape citizens and cultures in the 20th century. Professor Zimmerman's authored books include Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (2009) and Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century (2008). His writing regularly appears in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and other publications.

Ritty Lukose is a professor of anthropology and chair of the South Asia Initiative at New York University. Her research deals primarily with the relationship between politics and culture within the context of western, global and non-Western feminisms. She has authored numerous articles in journals like Anthropology and Education Quarterly, as well as the book Liberalization's Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizenship in India (2009).

Barron Lerner is a professor of medicine and population health at the New York University School of Medicine, and author of the award-winning book The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America (2003).Dr. Lerner has published extensively in scholarly journals and contributes essays to the Science Times section of The New York Times, Slate, Atlantic.com, and The Huffington Post. 

Perry Halkitis is a professor of applied psychology, global public health, and population health/medicine at New York University. He is also Director of the Center for Health, Identity, Behavior & Prevention Studies. He specializes in HIV/AIDS bio-behavioral research studies for gay men, with an emphasis on the intersection of HIV with drug use and mental health burden. His most recent book is entitled The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience (2013).

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