Sex-education / A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its relation to human life

by Maurice A. Bigelow

The third aim involves some difficult educational problems. Since we confess that we know so little concerning efficient methods for ethical, moral, or social teaching, it is evident that we must be far from a satisfactory plan for dealing with instruction which is intended to oppose most powerful instinctive tendencies and long-established habits of sensuality. Clearly the third aim sets no easy task for the educator; but since the possible solution of sex problems must turn on the sex actions of the individual in relation to society, the ethical-social aspects of sex-education must not be evaded because the way is not yet entirely clear. The fact is that a good beginning has been made, especially in teaching concerning social diseases, heredity, and eugenics.

Social hygiene and ethics.

The value of all the proposed teaching concerning the relation of immorality and social diseases is more ethical than hygienic. Read any of the standard literature on the social side of venereal diseases, especially the masterly writings of the eminent physician and chief organizer of the American movement for sex-education, the late Dr. Prince A. Morrow, of New York City; and one notes that the medical facts have bearings in two directions. First, they indicate the desirability of morality as a protection of personal health; and second, they teach that the pathological results of the individual's immoral living may be passed on later to innocent wives and children. The first is as clearly personal hygiene as teaching that impure water may cause typhoid; but the second is social hygiene and ethics. The second is more impressive to all but the most selfish people.

There is good reason for believing that information concerning the social diseases is more likely to impress the average young man through the social-ethical appeal much more than as a matter of personal health. Therefore, a biological lesson on social diseases, which may be presented most logically in connection with other germ diseases, may have its chief value in that its meaning is social and ethical.

Biology and ethics.

As another illustration of biology touching ethics, I have recently come to believe that the teaching concerning heredity and eugenics, which should be a standard part of the best sex-instruction, has its greatest value in the ethical appeal, and not in the direct biological application of the laws of heredity which underlie eugenics. I realize that this statement is likely to be disputed by those biologists who see in eugenics only the possibility of controlling heredity so as to propagate better strains of humans, just as breeders of plants and animals have produced better domesticated varieties. A biologist naturally believes that the ultimate aim of eugenics is improvement of physical and psychical qualities; but considering the ethical-social-biological complications of human sex-problems, it seems improbable that any decided and extensive improvement is likely to come if we continue to limit our interpretation of the principles of eugenics to the purely biological standpoint of the breeder of plants and animals. Let me illustrate by some concrete facts from eugenics:

There is a widespread opinion among science teachers that high-school biology should present some of the best established facts of heredity; and that these should be eugenically applied to human life by means of such illustrations as those afforded by the histories of certain degenerate families, such as the well-known Jukes and Kallikaks. A brief sketch of the history of the latter family, as described in Dr. Goddard's interesting book, "The Kallikak Family" (Macmillan), will make clear my point as to the ethical appeal of eugenics.

Eugenics and ethical teaching.

A young man of good ancestry broke the moral law about one hundred and forty years ago and became the father of an illegitimate son by a feeble-minded mother. Of 480 descendants of this son, there have been 46 normal, many immoral, many alcoholic and 143 feeble-minded. The same man who back in the revolutionary days made a moral mistake which led to such awful consequences, later married a woman of good family and became the progenitor of a second line of 496 descendants of whom 494 have been normal mentally, while two were affected by alliance with another family; and all have been first-class citizens, many of them prominent in business, professions, etc.

Even making due allowance for the depressing influence of the environment in which most of the down-and-out descendants in the degenerate line lived, the comparison between the normal and the abnormal lines from the same ancestor gives the most convincing eugenic evidence that has been discovered in the human race. Doubtless it will long be used as a basis for attempted biological control of the propagation of the unfit. Many similar cases of hereditary degeneracy are recorded in books on eugenics.