The Education of Shelby Knox

Shelby Knox is a high school student of fifteen. She lives in Lubbock, Texas. She grew up in a Southern Baptist family. Her faith is at the centre of her life. She is elected to the city’s youth commission. The commission exists to give young people a voice at city hall. There she comes up against a set of figures. Lubbock has some of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection in the state. The schools teach abstinence and nothing else. Shelby begins campaigning for comprehensive sex education. In the same period the rights of gay students at the school come up too. The work sets her against her church and the people around her. The documentary follows the change in her thinking. It screened at Sundance in 2005. It went out on American television in a documentary strand the same year. Shelby Knox is the subject throughout the seventy six minute film, an American production Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt finished in 2005.