The title of the University of Delaware's newest library exhibition is a question, and it is meant to be one. "Where Do We Go From Here? The History and Future of Sex Education in the United States" opened August 25 in the Information Room of Morris Library and runs through December 18, gathering a century's worth of school curricula, court documents, and advice manuals into a single room and asking visitors to reckon with how Americans have taught — and argued about — sex education.
On October 13, from 4 to 5 p.m., the exhibition's two co-curators will lead a tour of the materials on view and sit for a discussion about the work behind the show. Beth Wojciechowski, an undergraduate student in UD's Departments of Communication and Women and Gender Studies, and Alison Wessel, a social sciences librarian at the university, will talk about assembling the exhibition and about what the topic means for the campus community. The event is free and open to the public, with registration encouraged because seating is limited, and light refreshments will be served.
The exhibition itself is the product of a collaboration that is common at UD's Library, Museums and Press but unusual in its subject matter. Wojciechowski curated the show as an undergraduate, working alongside Wessel, with support from Petra Clark, an instruction librarian for Special Collections. Clark has curated exhibitions of her own — including "What They Saved: Souvenirs and Mementos in Special Collections" — and her role here reflects the library's practice of pairing student researchers with professional librarians to build shows out of the collections.
What those collections hold is the substance of the exhibition. The materials span from the early 20th century to the present and fall into three broad families: school curricula, legal documents addressing how sex education has been implemented in public schools, and advice books written for parents and for adolescents themselves. Placed side by side, they trace a subject that has never been settled. The exhibition's own framing notes that despite well-documented positive health outcomes for adolescents, sex education in the United States "has long been an intensely debated and often divisive topic," shaped over the past century by legal challenges, shifting cultural norms, and continuing disagreement — in both educational and religious settings — over what should be taught, how, and whether it belongs in schools at all.
The early 20th-century end of that timeline has a particular texture. Much of the first organized sex education in the United States grew out of the social hygiene movement, a Progressive Era reform effort that sought to combat venereal disease, tuberculosis, and other problems reformers believed had social roots. Social hygienists pushed for public education about sex, but their aims were moral as much as medical: they promoted strict self-discipline and, in many cases, embraced eugenic ideas about heredity and degeneration. That combination — genuine public-health concern tangled with moral prescription and worse — is exactly the kind of complexity the exhibition's documents are meant to surface. The advice books on display, aimed at parents and teenagers, show how the tone and content of that guidance shifted across the decades, while the legal documents record the fights over whether and how public schools could teach the subject.
By presenting these items together, the curators say, the exhibition invites visitors to consider not only how sex education has changed but also "the persistent gaps that remain." It asks them to reflect on questions of access, inclusion, identity, and ability, and to think critically about what equitable and comprehensive sex education might look like going forward. The question in the title, then, is not rhetorical decoration; it is the organizing problem of the show.
The exhibition is one of nine new displays the University of Delaware's Library, Museums and Press mounted for the fall 2026 semester, a slate that ranges from lead minerals to Abraham Lincoln memorials to Delaware labor history. All are free and open to the public, spread across gallery spaces on campus. "Where Do We Go From Here?" occupies the Information Room in Morris Library, at 181 South College Avenue in Newark, and can be visited during regular library hours through December 18.
The October 13 program is structured in two parts: a discussion first, in which Wojciechowski and Wessel reflect on preparing the exhibition and on the topic's resonance for the UD community, followed by a guided tour of the materials themselves. For anyone who has followed the recurring public battles over sex education — over curriculum standards, parental notification, consent, and inclusion — the hour offers something relatively rare: a chance to see the primary sources behind those debates and to hear from the people who spent a semester arranging them. Seating is limited, so those planning to attend are encouraged to register in advance.