Analysis Of Sex Education

What is acceptable when it comes to teaching kids about sex education? “What Schools Should Teach Kids About Sex” by Jessica Lahey uses more of a logical approach to the issues of sexual education given to adolescence, compared to “Sex Education Is One Thing” by Anna Quindlen which tells more of her personal story and opinion using pathos to connect to the audience. After reading both articles about sex education, it is clear that there are many different interpretations of what qualifies as sex education, who is qualified to teach it, and what should be included in the curriculum. Both writers believe that there should be more sex education taught to high school kids but they go about it in different ways, using rhetorical appeals of logic versus pathos. A very distinctive characteristic in the article by Lahey is how she uses the rhetorical appeal of logos to convince her readers she is correct. In “What Schools Should Teach About Sex”, Lahey has a very clear thesis in the first paragraph, “There is probably no subject that has posed greater headaches to teachers than sex education” ( ). Lahey makes it clear to her

Lahey’s approach is straight forward with facts and evidence. The rhetorical fallacy she used the most was logos; logic. Instead of giving her readers her own personal opinion she used other people’s words to say it for her. Her paper was overwhelming because the entire article was flooded with facts about sex education and the percentages of schools who teach it enough and the percentage of schools that don’t. In Quindlen’s article she tells a story. Personally, I connected much more with Quindlen because of the way her paper was presented. Quindlen’s main rhetorical fallacy was ethos which is emotion. She also used analogies and metaphors to connect with the