FOOTNOTES:
[30] An examination of tables of contents and indexes of standard school texts in nature study and biology will reveal the almost universal absence of all ideas relating to sex and reproduction. There are two or three recent exceptions.
[31] G. Stanley Hall, Educational Problems, vol. i, pp. 388-97, Thomson and Geddes, Problems of Sex, pp. 5-17.
[32] Thomson and Geddes, op. cit., pp. 46-52; Saleeby, Parenthood and Race Culture; Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage; Hall, Educational Problems, vol. i, pp. 424-43.
[33] Fisher, National Vitality; Hall, Youth, chaps. ii, v, vi, xii.
[34] "What makes a Magazine?" Twentieth Century Magazine, September, 1912, pp. 11-20; The Exploitation of Pleasure. Russell Sage Foundation.
[35] See Mrs. Woodallen Chapman, The Moral Problem of the Children, esp. pp. 61-93. Also the chapter in this book on the education of children.
[36] An epoch-marking book in this field is Miss Torelle's Plant and Animal Children and How They Grow. (Heath.) See also pamphlet, The Origin of Life, by R.E. Blount. (Scott, Foresman & Co.)
[37] "The Teaching of Sex in Schools and Colleges," Social Diseases, October, 1911. Addresses by G. Stanley Hall, Maurice A. Bigelow, Josiah Strong, Charles W. Eliot, and Mary Putnam Blount, Sexual Reproduction in Animals: the Purpose and Methods of teaching it. Proceedings N.E.A., 1912, pp. 1324-27.
[38] Hall, G.S., Adolescence, vol. i, pp. 459-62.
[39] Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil.
CHAPTER VIII
teaching phases: for children
By William Greenleaf Eliot, Jr.
My children when they were little were fascinated with a book which their mother used to read to them, called Mother Nature and Her Helpers. Each chapter or lesson was made up of interesting information and ideas suggested by the pictures. At the head of the first chapter was a picture of a mother sitting by a cradle with every surrounding and circumstance of humble, happy home life. Succeeding chapters were upon the cradle and the home of plants and animals. Ovaries of plants and nests of birds and squirrels were all set forth in terms of the child's experience of home life, home-building, home-protecting, and feeding the baby. Doubtless the design of the author was to lead the child to an understanding and appreciation of its own home life and love by showing it home life in its origins and elements. But an equally important implication lay in the fact that the child was brought into its intimacy with plant and animal life along the angle of its own human experience and of its own home ideals. After such an introduction to the homes of plants and animals, whenever it should seem best to apprise the child of the details of plant and animal reproduction, the additional facts would instantly find their places in close relation to facts already familiar and already related to his highest childish affections and ideals.
For the basis of sexual instruction for a child should be the difference, not the similarity between man and animals. If the basis is made the similarity between man and animals, the child, as time goes on and as its own sexual life increasingly awakens, may tend to imitate animals, may attempt to justify the natural and unrestrained promiscuousness of its own instincts, may justify unrestrained sexual life in the name of nature as against the alleged artificialities of civilization. The basis must be human, not animal; moral, not biological.
Biology goes far to explain humanity, but the interpretation is found in the spiritual affections, experiences, and implications of family life. The family life of animals is constituted of animal instinct freely followed. The family life of man would be ruined by the free following of animal instinct. There is a distinct danger in all so-called sex instruction of children which makes plant and animal life the norm.
The definite and clean instruction of children in the physical facts of reproduction may rightly and wisely begin with the simple facts, anatomical and functional, of plants and animals; but it is important that a true philosophy lie back of this instruction. Man is not only a higher order of mammalia; he is a worshiper of God and capable of practicing his presence. And from this base our instruction to children, drawn from the anatomical and functional life of plants and animals, must always subserve the moral, the spiritual superiority of man and the human family.
The little child will understand and even idealize plant and animal life if he learns of plant and animal life first in human terms. His moral development is menaced if this process is reversed so that a counter-tendency is set up,—a tendency to interpret the human functions in animal terms. It is better for the child to humanize animal relationships than to animalize human relationships,—and this can be achieved only through a constant observance of the human basis in the sexual as indeed in all phases of a child's education. The little book which I mentioned at the beginning does just this,—it introduces the child to the home life of animals, it interprets animal life in ideal terms. It lays a basis for relating later information of sex functions to the home life of plants and animals. At the proper time in a child's development, he is prepared to place a true and intelligent value upon the differences between the home life of animals and the home life of human beings, and to justify intelligently and with full consent of mind and sanction of conscience the differences of sexual practice as between plants and animals on the one hand and human beings on the other. He is prepared to see that it is enough for the sex life of plants and animals that it be physically and biologically normal. It is not enough for the true and ideal family life of man that the sex relation should be biologically normal. It must be morally normal—normal, that is, to the highest human interests.
The more concrete and detailed problems of method would not be serious if every child's mind were a blank or even if its instincts were analogous to normal animals. But neither is the case, and the problem of method and means of instruction is therefore amazingly complicated. If the sex life of a child were analogous to that of normal animals, it would not awaken at all until puberty. And if the child's mind were a blank on sex matters, it need only be kept from the invasion of wrong ideas from outside. But the sex life of a child begins long before puberty,—both physically and mentally. In the child, the physical signs are more or less detached from the mental signs,—at this or that phase of a child's life, the one or the other may have precedence; but the two are subtly interrelated, and tend to contribute to each other. In the human being a sex life that is normal, both biologically and morally, is an achievement; not a thing which would take care of itself if the child were left alone and merely kept ignorant of the abnormal. The human child is born abnormal,—that is to say, with latent possibilities of sexual abnormality, physical and mental,—and this by virtue of the mere fact that he is not only with animals a creature of instinct, but with humanity a being with ideas.
This statement is doubtless oftener true of the sex life of boy children than of girl children; but it is a fact and a very important fact, and it lies at the bottom of the problem when we come to consider the details of instructional method. If it were not for these facts, it would make no difference who imparted sex information to the child, so the facts were accurately told; and it would make no difference what facts were given, or at what age the child received them, if no lies were conveyed. But because the child's physical and mental sex life awakens early, and because every child has latent tendencies to abnormality and latent responsiveness to the abnormal, it is of critical importance that we decide who shall teach the individual child, when the child shall be informed, and what the child shall be told. It is of critical importance because, if the instruction comes wrongly, we may, even with good intentions, contribute to the very abnormality that we wish to forefend or overcome. With some children we could perhaps safely take chances so far as the self-awakening sex life is concerned if we did not know that it is impossible, without more harm than good to keep the child from such perfectly normal relations with other children as almost certainly will expose it to disastrous misinformation a suggestion.
Whatever ought to be said of the importance of the home tradition and ideals and the general physical and moral regimen of the child (and these are of supreme importance), the facts of the last two paragraphs lay the ground for this general statement: that in the case of a child whose moral and sexual environment has been bad and perverting, proper sex instruction cannot make matters worse, whereas in the best families much harm may arise from the lack of such instruction.
If any information is imparted to the child at all, the first instruction should properly come from one or other of the child's parents. It is sometimes the case that opportunity for the first information is presented when the child asks questions. And the supposed question of the child is, "Where did the baby come from?" Our course would be much smoother if every child asked its mother or father this question, or if every child began with this particular question, or if every child asked any question at all. Sometimes the child asks the nurse this question; sometimes the child is an only child or for some other reason this question never occurs to it; sometimes the child's first question pertains to some curiosity about its own navel, or "where eggs come from," or "why the hen makes them," or "how they get into the hen," or what is meant by "half shepherd and half St. Bernard." But children do not ask the questions that the books say they ask, and ready-made answers do not always apply.
Whether a child asks the conventional questions or the unexpected questions, and whether it asks questions or not, the parent ought to have some pretty definite notion of when, what, and how to tell a child. A child's questions about the baby should be answered truthfully; all such replies as escape by the stork, cabbage-patch, or grocer-boy route should be avoided. It goes without saying that children's questions should be met seriously and even reverently, and that parents should never speak of nor allude lightly, jokingly, or irreverently to sex relationships in the child's presence.
A child may ask a question prematurely, or at a time when the parent finds it impossible to answer in such a way as to make the desired impression or to avoid the undesirable impression. The postponement should be frankly a postponement, and the parent should answer the question at some later time chosen by the parent and upon the parent's own motion. If the child never affords the parent a natural opening for the first or later conversation, the parent should make the opening by reference to the recent arrival of a baby in the child's home, or in some neighbor's family, or even to the arrival of kittens or chicks.
Such preliminary information should come at or near the first asking of questions, or if no questions are asked, at any convenient time between the ages of six and eight years, and in any case before the child goes to school or mingles much away from home with other children. It is a mistake to suppose that very much need be said to the young child. If the child's normal curiosity is satisfied in a clean way from the right source, that is sufficient. Especially should it be advised of the truth about those facts concerning which it is liable be misinformed in its contacts with other children. Only, parents ought to remember that their child, however carefully brought up and protected, at any time and of its own motion, may itself be that corrupting "other child" against which we are so sedulously warned!
Or, again, the child when it has been duly instructed by parents may without harmful intentions talk too freely with other children. It may do some harm to other children in this; but what is more likely, it may receive harm by calling out uninformed and hurtful conversation from the other side. For this reason, a parent in talking to children should be careful to explain that they should not talk to others. If they are properly brought-up children, their modesty will respond, and their trained obedience will keep faith.
This is the place to try to make clear the importance of such secrecy and confidence between parents and child. There is a secrecy which adds a glamour of pleasurable naughtiness, leading straight to prudery and pruriency with all their consequences. Such secrecy is the sort that develops when parents do take the child into their confidence. Such harmful secrecy is not to be confounded with the confidence between parent and child. In opposing the harmful kind of secrecy, there are those who very wrongly, as I believe, object to any secrecy; who say, "All things are clean; why should any difference whatever be made between the lungs or the stomach, and the sex organs; it is often the very making of any distinction that causes and helps cause all the trouble." Now the case against all secrecy would be valid if the premises of the argument were sound. Roughly speaking, lungs are lungs, and stomachs are stomachs, but the sex organs and their impulses, reflexes, and irradiations are connected with the subtlest complexes of mind and affections, inextricably connected with everything human, with further irradiations into the entire social body.
By all that makes it important to prevent the private and mutual secrecies of children, by so much and ten times more is it important to establish confidential secrecy between parent and child. For in so doing, you not only prevent the undesirable secrecy, but you build normally on modesty; you lay foundations for a true sense of shame, disgust, and disgrace; and in doing so, set up one of the strong defenses against perversions and prurient allurement and seduction.
Prudery should be made impossible and true modesty conserved by proper secrecy in sex matters, and back of that by the proper attitude, conversation, and practice in the child's familiar domestic functions. Prudery and modesty must not be confounded; for by as much as we condemn the one, ought we to value the other.
Up to the time, then, that a child goes to school, everything has probably been done that can be done so far as its instruction is concerned, (1) if the child has been kept as far as possible from foul suggestions from others; (2) if the child has had its questions honestly answered or temporarily though unevasively postponed; (3) if the child knows from its parents' lips that it came into the world from its mother's body, first growing there "beneath its mother's heart" until it was strong enough to be born; and that the mother would never have wished to have her child grow in her body had it not been that there was a strong man who would care for both mother and little child with great love and tenderness; that there has to be a father to love the mother and child, and that, therefore, mother and child must love the father, and the child must love both father and mother, and that this love is what makes the home; and (4) if in the process of imparting information, confidence has been established and modesty conserved.
Anyone who has ever seen a group of six- to ten-year-old boys and girls stand side by side and gaze with rapt but natural wonder and delight at a bureau drawer or chest full of the beautiful little garments waiting and ready for an expected child can never doubt the wisdom of a child's knowing from the start some better version of the story than any of the evasive temporizings of the conventional parent.
What shall the parent do who has never spoken of these things to his child until now the child is ten, eleven, or twelve years of age, and especially if the parent has given the child one of these evasive answers in reply to its innocent questions? It may be said in passing that if the parent has thus evasively answered the child's first questions, he will never be bothered in all probability with any more questions. For the best way to set up the barrier is to answer questions falsely; and one way to establish confidence and to facilitate further communication is to answer truthfully.
The child may know more or less than you think it knows. The parent does not know what a ten- or twelve-year-old child knows or does not know. Again, a parent does not know at what time or in what way or to what extent the child's sexual life and impulse have already awakened. And the parent does not know to what extent the child may know "what ain't so." It is a mistake in most cases for the parent to try to find answers to these questions by questioning the child. For just as a parent may start wrong by deceiving the child, so the child may start wrong by deceiving the parent, and even a pretty good child, especially after it has been deceived by the parent, is likely to follow the same cue when it is questioned by the parent. The parent should not tempt the child to such a misstep.
Again, the parent, whether mother or father, should never try to open the conversation or resume it at a time when the boy or girl is likely to be interrupted or distracted or is eager at the moment to be somewhere else and doing something else. The mother and daughter quietly sewing together, or the father and son off for a walk, or sitting on a log, or lying on the grass, are ready for a confidential talk.
If the boy or girl was deceived in response to its first questions, the father or mother may retract in some such way as this: "Do you remember, Molly, that when you asked me where your baby brother came from, I told you the doctor made us a present? Well, that's the way fathers and mothers answer little children, just as we told you that Christmas presents came from Santa Claus. You came to know that papa and mamma are Santa Claus and that Santa Claus is a fairy story—and so you have probably already learned how the baby came. The baby really grows in the mother's body—did you know that? Do you know how long it takes for it to grow there? No? It takes nine months. Before you were born, you were growing inside of your mother's body. The blood from your mother's body flowed into your body; in this way your body grew. When the baby comes out of its mother's body, it does not hurt the baby, but it hurts the mother. It was so when you were born, but your mother was so happy to think she was to have a baby and to feel it growing inside her body that she did not think much about the pain. If your mother is ever a little tired and cross, you must remember that she loves you beyond anything that pain can measure and that she deserves your tenderest care."
At this or some other fitting time, the father or mother may give the child some further intimation of the process by which the child comes to grow in the mother's body, and in some such way as follows: "Some one may have told you how babies come to grow in their mothers' bodies. But most people are ignorant about these things. I think I can explain it to you a little if you will look for a moment at this flower that I have in my hand, because the coming of a baby in the mother's body is in some ways like the coming of the seed in the body of the flower. You have probably learned at school in your nature-study work that these are—what? Yes, the petals. And these stamens, and this is the pistil. Do you notice the powder on the end of the stamen? That is called pollen. If you put that powder under magnifying glass, each grain will look like a grain of wheat. Now, do you notice that the pistil spreads out here at the base like a vase with a narrow neck and big bowl? I am going to cut the thick part open. Do you notice those tiny things like seeds? Yes, those are seeds, but they would not grow just by themselves. A grain of that pollen gets on to the end of the pistil (sometimes the wind, sometimes a bee puts it there), and immediately it begins to send a long thread from itself right down the center of the pistil, and this thread carries at the front the heart of the pollen grain, and when it reaches the tiny seed the two go together and the heart of the pollen joins with the heart of the seed and then it is a true seed and can grow,—and can grow into another plant that can have flowers that can have seeds, and so on almost forever. No one fully understands this very wonderful fact. We only know that it is a fact,—that the heart of a seed from a father flower had to join to the heart of a seed of a mother flower before a true seed that can grow into a plant is born. And we only know that something like this is true about father and mother animals, and that something like this is true of our own human father and mother."
So much to show how the parent may "break in," for that is often the crucial thing. After the start is made, details may be found in the books provided for just this purpose.[40] Indeed, after beginning, it is sometimes better to put the right book into the boy's hands; or better yet to read the book with the child. Especially is the latter course preferable if the book seems at any point unwise,—and there are few books prepared for children which are not at some point or other unwise. Only, in all this process of definite instruction in which analogies from the life of plants and animals are used, the instructor must make sure that the illustrations are thought of as analogies for the anatomy and biology only, and guards must be reserved, implicitly and explicitly, against the child's supposing that everything in plants and animals is normal for human beings. All that the child learns of reproduction of plants and animals should be related to the home and affectional life even of animals, and the analogy between animals and man should stop far short of that to which in all the animal world there is no real analogy—the life and meaning of the higher order of human family life.
If the proper person to teach the child is the parent and if the parent does not know how, the obvious thing to do is to call the parents together and to try to teach them how. Besides meetings for parents (fathers and mothers together), excellent results have come from meetings for fathers and sons addressed by a man, and from meetings for mothers and daughters addressed by a woman.
The following details as to arrangement and conducting of parents' meetings may be of value. For such meetings in the public school, the consent of the local school board must be obtained. This ought not to be granted if those seeking permission are either cranks or quacks. The Viavi people are said to be obtaining such permission for use of schoolhouses under the specious plea of social hygiene. Others, well intentioned but with extreme purist ideas and unwise methods, occasionally volunteer their services. The school authorities should be cautious. But when those who apply are intelligent and honest and above question as to their standing and judgment, school boards ought not only to consent, but to support and coöperate. A grudging consent, mixed with indifference, finds its way by capillary attraction to the school principals and teachers and constitutes a real hindrance. When the consent of the school authorities has been obtained, the next step is the selection and training of speakers and the notification or the parents. Where permitted, the notices or invitations should be sent out by the school in which the meeting is to be held, by mail, sealed, to every home in the district whence pupils in that school come. This should be done even if the local society has to pay the postage. If the school authorities will not or cannot do this, then cards of invitation should be sent home through the pupils. In either case, the invitation should be so worded as to do no harm to the children who may read it.
Parents' meetings may be addressed by two speakers, a physician and a layman. The two speakers should get to the schoolhouse in time to see that the speaker's desk and chair are not on a high platform too far from the little group of parents. The chair and table should be brought down to the floor close to the seats and the parents brought forward. The principal of the school should introduce the layman, accompanying the physician, to be chairman of the evening. The chairman should make a brief address, as outlined in the syllabus provided by the Committee on Education of the Society, introducing the physician. The physician should make a brief address as outlined in the syllabus, and then, after proper explanations, the physician should resume his chair. Both physician and layman, seated, should engage in a dialogue, in which the layman should endeavor with all the intelligence, sympathy, and skill at his command to put himself in the place of the humblest parent in the room and ask such questions of the physician as such a parent might ask or ought to ask. For example:—
Layman, "Doctor, I have a little boy four years old. When ought I to talk to him about sex matters?"
Physician, "When the child asks questions."
Layman, "What do you mean by that?"
Physician, "Well,—suppose the child asks where the baby came from?"
Layman, "What do you say if the child asks that?"
Physician, "I would tell it that the baby grows in its mother's body," etc.
Layman, "I have a little boy eight years old to whom I have never talked about these things. What do you advise?"
Physician, "I would take the first opportunity, some time when the boy is not likely to be interrupted. Refer to some newly arrived or expected baby and tell him frankly where the baby comes from."
Layman, "But Doctor, I have already told him that a stork brought the baby."
Physician, "Then tell him you told him that as a fairy story like the Santa Claus story, but that now he is old enough to know the truth. Then tell him the truth."
Layman, "But I find it hard to talk about these things and I am afraid my child might ask me questions I could not answer."
Physician, "There are books, a list of which will be handed you, which you can read, and parts or all of which you can read to your child."
Layman, "What if my child asks me a question I can't answer."
Physician, "Don't dodge or evade. If you must postpone an answer, do so frankly with a promise that when you can you will answer, or that you will put him in the way of getting good information by reading or otherwise."
This conversation should be extended to apply to adolescent boys and girls and to young men and women. Enough has been given to show the nature and spirit of the dialogue. The people's interest never flags. The layman must ask all the strategic questions, and he must keep at it until he gets answers in simple, understandable terms. If the physician uses "function" or "coöordinate" or "puberty" or "adolescence" or other academic terms, the layman must force simple words at every turn; and in any attempts to describe what a parent should say to a child, the layman should take care that a child's comprehension is reached and that the parent is guided as, to vocabulary. Both speakers should lift the level of their counsels above that of mere physical prudence; they should explain and duly emphasize the moral issue.