In every child, as I have tried to show you there are hidden conflicts of jealousy, of love, of hate, which determine beforehand its response to the teaching that is given by the parents.
I cannot here treat at all adequately this difficult question; it is one on which I have written elsewhere (Mother and Son, Sex Education and National Health, The Mind of the Naughty Child) I can say only what I have emphasised already that from the start to the end, sex education is an emotional education. That, of course, is why it is so difficult.
There is, in my opinion, too firm a belief in the efficacy of formal instruction. The way is not so easy as this to discharge our debt to the young. And sometimes I fear that parental talks about sex, in particular when such talks are delayed until the boy or the girl is reaching puberty, or until the time when the dangers of school life have to be met, involving, as it must, a sudden breaking through of the silence of years, may work for harm instead of for good. That this is so in the case of some boys and girls I know to be true. You see you cannot grow flowers in a soil choked already with weeds.
THE MYTH OF THE VIRTUOUS SEX
A day or two ago I was passing one of the great London schools at the afternoon hour when the boys were released. I write “boys,” but among them were many of sixteen, seventeen, or even eighteen years who looked almost men.
On the street side, two flappers, quite young—not more, I should judge, than fifteen, stood with their faces pressed between the iron rails and watched the exit of the boys. Certainly they were not nice girls; they invited with smiles, they giggled, they ogled, they gestured. There could, I think, be no mistake as to the purpose of the girls.
I am glad to record that no single boy took the slightest notice of them.
Now this very unpleasant incident has set me thinking. I am oppressed with feelings of responsibility; yes—and also of shame. If I am to be honest I must accept here, as in all relations between the two sexes, the validity of the mans’ plea that rings—yes, and will continue to ring—through the centuries: “The woman tempted me!”