I cannot do better than quote from Havelock Ellis's General Preface to The Psychology of Sex:—
'A resolve slowly grew up within me,' he writes, 'one main part of my life-work should be to make clear the problem of sex. That was more than twenty years ago. Since then I can honestly say that in all that I have done that resolve has never been far from my thoughts.... Now that I have, at length, reached the time for beginning to publish my results, these results scarcely seem to me large. As a youth I had hoped to settle problems for those that came after; now I am quietly content if I do little more than state them. For even that, I now think, is much. It is, at least, the half of knowledge. In this particular field the evil of ignorance is magnified by our efforts to suppress that which can never be suppressed, though in the effort of suppression it may become perverted.'
If this is the conclusion at the end of his work and of his life, of perhaps the greatest living authority on sex, by what right does the amateur produce cheerful remedies.
In the case of the Public School it is indeed something to state the problems. There is so much ignorance to dispel; the ignorance of mothers, the ignorance of fathers who have themselves not been to a Public School, the conspiracy of silence of boys, old boys and masters. Too much and, at the same time, too little, is made of immorality. Schoolmasters assure us that its appearance is occasional, but their attitude to it is that of a doctor who suspects that his patient is suffering from a malignant disease and watches all the time for signs of it to appear. The schoolmaster is always afraid lest he may be sitting on a volcano. He encourages the athletic cult as a preventative, in the belief that the boy who is keen on games will not wish to endanger his health, and that the boy who has played football all the afternoon and has boxed between tea and lock-up will be too tired to embark on any further adventures. It does not occur to him that the boy will be equally too tired to do his prep.
Such encouragement of the athletic cult is a confession of failure. It is as though the master were to say: 'I know I cannot interest you in your work. I know that unless I look after you, you will land yourself in all manner of mischief. A man must have a god of sorts, therefore make unto yourself whatsoever manner of god you choose, and I will see that it receives a fitting reverence.'
The public school code of honour, the majority of the standards, indeed, of school life are dependent on the athletic worship, and the athletic worship is in its turn largely dependent, not so much on the moral question, as on the official attitude to the moral question. Too much energy has been devoted to the damming of trickles, while on another side of the hill the main stream has passed into the valley, laying waste the plains.
Greater honesty between boys, parents, and masters would undoubtedly achieve much. But more than a change of spirit is required. If no boy was allowed to stay on at school after the term in which he became seventeen years old, I believe that the moral question would, to a large extent, simplify itself.