Perhaps one of the most devastating popular critiques of comprehensive sex education came from Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. The journalist who said that Dan Quayle was right also was willing to say that sex education was wrong. Comprehensive sex education is mandated in at least seventeen states, so Whitehead chose one of those states and focused her analysis on the sex education experiment in New Jersey. Like other curricula, the New Jersey sex education program rests on certain questionable assumptions. The first tenet is that children are sexual from birth .
Sex educators reject the classic notion of a latency period until approximately age twelve.
Second, children are sexually miseducated . Parents try to protect their children, fail to affirm their sexuality, and even discuss sexuality in a context of moralizing. The media, they say, is also guilty of providing sexual misinformation. Third, if mis-education is the problem, then sex education in the schools is the solution . Learning about Family Life is the curriculum used in New Jersey.