The mother who establishes a relationship of confidence with her child during these first years will probably, if she possesses any measure of wisdom and tact, be able to preserve it even after the epoch of puberty into the difficult years of adolescence. But as an educator in the narrower sense her functions will, in most cases, end at or before puberty. A somewhat more technical and completely impersonal acquaintance with the essential facts of sex then becomes desirable, and this would usually be supplied by the school.
The great though capricious educator, Basedow, to some extent a pupil of Rousseau, was an early pioneer in both the theory and the practice of giving school children instruction in the facts of the sexual life, from the age of ten onwards. He insists much on this subject in his great treatise, the Elementarwerk (1770-1774). The questions of children are to be answered truthfully, he states, and they must be taught never to jest at anything so sacred and serious as the sexual relations. They are to be shown pictures of childbirth, and the dangers of sexual irregularities are to be clearly expounded to them at the outset. Boys are to be taken to hospitals to see the results of venereal disease. Basedow is aware that many parents and teachers will be shocked at his insistence on these things in his books and in his practical pedagogic work, but such people, he declares, ought to be shocked at the Bible (see, e.g., Pinloche, La Rèforme de l'Education en Allemagne au dixhuitième siècle: Basedow et le Philanthropinisme, pp. 125, 256, 260, 272). Basedow was too far ahead of his own time, and even of ours, to exert much influence in this matter, and he had few immediate imitators.
Somewhat later than Basedow, a distinguished English physician, Thomas Beddoes, worked on somewhat the same lines, seeking to promote sexual knowledge by lectures and demonstrations. In his remarkable book, Hygeia, published in 1802 (vol. i, Essay IV) he sets forth the absurdity of the conventional requirement that "discretion and ignorance should lodge in the same bosom," and deals at length with the question of masturbation and the need of sexual education. He insists on the great importance of lectures on natural history which, he had found, could be given with perfect propriety to a mixed audience. His experiences had shown that botany, the amphibia, the hen and her eggs, human anatomy, even disease and sometimes the sight of it, are salutary from this point of view. He thinks it is a happy thing for a child to gain his first knowledge of sexual difference from anatomical subjects, the dignity of death being a noble prelude to the knowledge of sex and depriving it forever of morbid prurience. It is scarcely necessary to remark that this method of teaching children the elements of sexual anatomy in the post-mortem room has not found many advocates or followers; it is undesirable, for it fails to take into account the sensitiveness of children to such impressions, and it is unnecessary, for it is just as easy to teach the dignity of life as the dignity of death.
The duty of the school to impart education in matters of sex to children has in recent years been vigorously and ably advocated by Maria Lischnewska (op. cit.), who speaks with thirty years' experience as a teacher and an intimate acquaintance with children and their home life. She argues that among the mass of the population to-day, while in the home-life there is every opportunity for coarse familiarity with sexual matters, there is no opportunity for a pure and enlightened introduction to them, parents being for the most part both morally and intellectually incapable of aiding their children here. That the school should assume the leading part in this task is, she believes, in accordance with the whole tendency of modern civilized life. She would have the instruction graduated in such a manner that during the fifth or sixth year of school life the pupil would receive instruction, with the aid of diagrams, concerning the sexual organs and functions of the higher mammals, the bull and cow being selected by preference. The facts of gestation would of course be included. When this stage was reached it would be easy to pass on to the human species with the statement: "Just in the same way as the calf develops in the cow so the child develops in the mother's body."
It is difficult not to recognize the force of Maria Lischnewska's argument, and it seems highly probable that, as she asserts, the instruction proposed lies in the course of our present path of progress. Such instruction would be formal, unemotional, and impersonal; it would be given not as specific instruction in matters of sex, but simply as a part of natural history. It would supplement, so far as mere knowledge is concerned, the information the child had already received from its mother. But it would by no means supplant or replace the personal and intimate relationship of confidence between mother and child. That is always to be aimed at, and though it may not be possible among the ill-educated masses of to-day, nothing else will adequately take its place.
There can be no doubt, however, that while in the future the school will most probably be regarded as the proper place in which to teach the elements of physiology—and not as at present a merely emasculated and effeminated physiology—the introduction of such reformed teaching is as yet impracticable in many communities. A coarse and ill-bred community moves in a vicious circle. Its members are brought up to believe that sex matters are filthy, and when they become adults they protest violently against their children being taught this filthy knowledge. The teacher's task is thus rendered at the best difficult, and under democratic conditions impossible. We cannot, therefore, hope for any immediate introduction of sexual physiology into schools, even in the unobtrusive form in which alone it could properly be introduced, that is to say as a natural and inevitable part of general physiology.
This objection to animal physiology by no means applies, however, to botany. There can be little doubt that botany is of all the natural sciences that which best admits of this incidental instruction in the fundamental facts of sex, when we are concerned with children below the age of puberty. There are at least two reasons why this should be so. In the first place botany really presents the beginnings of sex, in their most naked and essential forms; it makes clear the nature, origin, and significance of sex. In the second place, in dealing with plants the facts of sex can be stated to children of either sex or any age quite plainly and nakedly without any reserve, for no one nowadays regards the botanical facts of sex as in any way offensive. The expounder of sex in plants also has on his side the advantage of being able to assert, without question, the entire beauty of the sexual process. He is not confronted by the ignorance, bad education, and false associations which have made it so difficult either to see or to show the beauty of sex in animals. From the sex-life of plants to the sex-life of the lower animals there is, however, but a step which the teacher, according to his discretion, may take.
An early educational authority, Salzmann, in 1785 advocated the sexual enlightenment of children by first teaching them botany, to be followed by zoölogy. In modern times the method of imparting sex knowledge to children by means, in the first place, of botany, has been generally advocated, and from the most various quarters. Thus Marro (La Pubertà, p. 300) recommends this plan. J. Hudrey-Menos ("La Question du Sexe dans l'Education," Revue Socialiste, June, 1895), gives the same advice. Rudolf Sommer, in a paper entitled "Mädchenerziehung oder Menschenbildung?" (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang I, Heft 3) recommends that the first introduction of sex knowledge to children should be made by talking to them on simple natural history subjects; "there are endless opportunities," he remarks, "over a fairy-tale, or a walk, or a fruit, or an egg, the sowing of seed or the nest-building of birds." Canon Lyttelton (Training of the Young in Laws of Sex, pp. 74 et seq.) advises a somewhat similar method, though laying chief stress on personal confidence between the child and his mother; "reference is made to the animal world just so far as the child's knowledge extends, so as to prevent the new facts from being viewed in isolation, but the main emphasis is laid on his feeling for his mother and the instinct which exists in nearly all children of reverence due to the maternal relation;" he adds that, however difficult the subject may seem, the essential facts of paternity must also be explained to boys and girls alike. Keyes, again (New York Medical Journal, Feb. 10, 1906), advocates teaching children from an early age the sexual facts of plant life and also concerning insects and other lower animals, and so gradually leading up to human beings, the matter being thus robbed of its unwholesome mystery. Mrs. Ennis Richmond (Boyhood, p. 62) recommends that children should be sent to spend some of their time upon a farm, so that they may not only become acquainted with the general facts of the natural world, but also with the sexual lives of animals, learning things which it is difficult to teach verbally. Karina Karin ("Wie erzieht man ein Kind zür wissenden Keuschheit?" Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang I, Heft 4), reproducing some of her talks with her nine-year old son, from the time that he first asked her where children came from, shows how she began with telling him about flowers, to pass on to fish and birds, and finally to the facts of human pregnancy, showing him pictures from an obstetrical manual of the child in its mother's body. It may be added that the advisability of beginning the sex teaching of children with the facts of botany was repeatedly emphasized by various speakers at the special meeting of the German Congress for Combating Venereal Disease devoted to the subject of sexual instruction (Sexualpädagogik, especially pp. 36, 47, 76).
The transition from botany to the elementary zoölogy of the lower animals, to human anatomy and physiology, and to the science of anthropology based on these, is simple and natural. It is not likely to be taken in detail until the age of puberty. Sex enters into all these subjects and should not be artificially excluded from them in the education of either boys or girls. The text-books from which the sexual system is entirely omitted ought no longer to be tolerated. The nature and secretion of the testicles, the meaning of the ovaries and of menstruation, as well as the significance of metabolism and the urinary excretion, should be clear in their main lines to all boys and girls who have reached the age of puberty.