DIFFICULTIES AND MISTAKES IN SEX EDUCATION
To the theoretical teacher or parent eager to reform the world on paper, it may seem easy to introduce sex education into the nursery training of the home, and into the curriculum of our schools. It appears a comparatively easy matter to tell the little child the truth about its own body, and as it grows older, to give carefully prepared lessons about plants and animals, which shall lead it slowly and beautifully into the way of knowledge.
Text books have been written, pamphlets officially issued, schemes drawn up for home and school instruction, and rules laid down—new finger-posts to right conduct, whereby the younger generation may be enlightened and (as we hope) by this means saved from making the mistakes that we ourselves have made.
I wish it were as simple as this. That sex instruction could be taken from books.
Of late various attempts have been made to focus attention on this aspect of the question or on that; we have been told how this teaching should be given, and with still greater assurance how it should not be given; this must be done and that must not be done; this said and that left unsaid. And groups of earnest-minded parents and teachers, in almost every town, have met together to discuss and decide debatable points; lecturers have been applied for, and their utterances have been listened to as a new gospel; yet I venture to think that, as in all other experimental and debatable questions, the very multitude of counsel and the earnestness that is expended, indicates the uncertainty of our knowledge and the doubtful value of many of our affirmations.
I find a tendency amongst most grown-ups, and especially teachers and advanced parents who ought to know better, to place too firm a reliance on their own power to educate the young in sex. I myself have done this. Like those drowning in deep water where they cannot swim, we have clutched at any plank of hope. You see so many of the old planks—religion, social barriers, chaperones, home restrictions, and so many more, on which our parents used to rely, have failed us; been broken in our hands by the vigorous destroying grasp of the young generation; and, therefore, we have clutched with frantic fingers at this new fair-looking life-raft, in pursuit of the one aim, to protect our children.
But will it save them? I doubt if it will except in a limited and very different way from what is usually accepted. We cannot help the young very far or deeply by any of our teaching. Not only do they want their own experience, not ours, but it is right for them to have it. The urge of adolescence carries them away out of our detaining hands. And I think it may be well that at once we realize and acknowledge the very narrow limits of our power.
Thus I have nothing new or very striking to bring to the solution of this difficult problem. I shall endeavour, however, to look at the matter broadly and practically, and attempt to indicate in what direction, as it seems to me, further progress may be made at the present stage of our very faulty knowledge.
One of the most disturbing features that we have to recognise in relation to the child is the very early age at which sex manifests itself. It was formerly supposed that the sex-life began at the age of puberty. Nothing is more untrue. Every child is born with instincts and desires—feelings of love, of hate, of jealousy, which furnish the motives of conduct, and are accompanied by physical manifestations of pleasure or discomfort which express themselves, often in a veiled way, as wishes and cravings, that find relief in action, and must therefore be yoked either to some burden of utility or to some car of vanity.
It should be noted, however, that the word sexual is somewhat ambiguous, because I want to stretch it to include the very germs that afterwards blossom into the adult sex-life. The little girl with her doll is maternal, and the boy with a tin sword is showing the crudest manifestation of the male protective instinct.