For my final paper for American Culture class, I will explore the need to teach sex education in school, especially in high school. My paper will discuss both cultural and pedagogical sides of the topic. It is a reflection of the movie "The Education of Shelby Knox", which well illustrates how teen students' life is without having sex education in their school curriculum. Based on the content of the movie and the information I have read from many articles on the topic, I will show more of my understanding on this special aspect, sex education, of American education and culture.
I will investigate some reasons why sex education was included in the American schools' curriculum by describing important situations in the movie which are the main factors making Shelby Knox, the main actress of this movie, to stand up and fight for the sake of herself and her friends to be taught about sex. The advantages and disadvantages of teaching sex education in school will be displayed clearly to demonstrate its account. In my final paper, I will carefully describe how this movie is a good petition for sex education to be instructed, and how it portrays the hard procedure of students and people combatting for their sake to bring sex education teaching into reality in American culture. I will depict the reason why teenagers should know about sex to protect themselves. Moreover, the difficulty of teaching sex education in school will be present in details. Home sex education also gives a strong support to teaching sex education in school, which will also be introduced to give people an entire view of the topic. I will also compare a bit about the difference between my home country, Vietnamese, and American culture on the issue of sex education. The methodology for writing my final paper involves using sociological and historical studies as well as academic articles to make an in-depth analysis on different aspects of the topic.
My paper will be divided into several parts which help reader gradually get the main points of my thesis. Firstly, I will give a summary of the movie "The education of Shelby Knox" to provide a general view of the cultural points I want to present. Secondly, the history of teaching sex education in American culture will be offered to show how hard the process of getting sex education into school curriculum is. The next part will be an analysis of some difficulties and problems that teachers, students, and parents meet when sex education is being carried out in school. The roles of parents and home sex education will be explained in the fourth part of my paper to illustrate another crucial factor affecting school sex education. The final part will discuss more about students' attitude toward learning sex education in school, and the effects, pros and cons, sex education brings to students. The inspiration of this topic comes from the differences between Vietnamese culture and American culture that I recognize when watching the movie. Vietnamese school system does not include sex education yet, which is the reason why students are dull about sex stuffs and have to suffer from bad results sex has caused to them. A conclusion will be also provided to show how the assumption on sex education in Asia is different from America, and why it is really important and urgent for sex education to be taught in school.
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