Friends' Central is 'Teaching Good Sex'

In an age when abstinence only education is de rigueur, Friends' Central School's Al Vernacchio is taking an unique and controversial approach to teaching his senior class about sex: honesty.

As outlined in Sunday's cover story of the New York Times Magazine, Vernacchio's sex ed class ("Sexuality and Society") centers around frank and often explicit discussion of the agony and the ecstasy of human sexuality, that lingers, to an extent almost unheard of, on the later. The 47-year-old lectures as much on the pleasures of good sex as he does STDs and unplanned pregnancies.

"In its breadth, depth and frank embrace of sexuality as, what Vernacchio calls, a 'force for good'—even for teenagers—this sex-ed class may well be the only one of its kind in the United States," author Laurie Abraham writes. 

Abraham quotes a professor of social psychology at the City University of New York as saying that "what all adolescents crave is a 'safe space' to pull apart and ponder the stew of relationships and sexual activity—including intimacy and desire and betrayal and coercion.

"Vernacchio’s classroom is such a setting."

Anecdotally, his students seem to benefit from the safe space he provides them to discuss the usually taboo subject material, but considering the present cultural mood and the history of sexual education in the United States, will Vernacchio's novel approach become a new template for sex ed or a readily forgotten anomaly?

"By the end of the 1980s, sex ed had taken its place in the basket of wedge issues dividing the right and left," Abraham says. "This created the opening for abstinence instruction ... to bulldoze any curriculum that didn’t treat sex as forbidden for teenagers." For other believers in comprehensive sex ed, "the license Vernacchio has to roam the sexual landscape is almost unimaginable."