It will be most helpful if we consider the problem of selecting teachers with a view to rejecting those who certainly should not undertake the special hygienic and ethical teaching, for teachers who are good in other subjects and who are fortunately free from certain disqualifications discussed in the following, may by means of study adapt themselves for the final and most important stages of sex-education.
There are five types of teachers who should be regarded as disqualified for teaching personal sex-hygiene and sex-ethics.
Embarrassed teachers.
First, those men and women who are unable to speak of sex-hygiene as calmly and seriously as they do of any other phase of hygiene had better not undertake the instruction of young people. There are many such men and women among teachers who, so far as scientific training is concerned, ought to be good teachers of sex-hygiene. As an illustration of this attitude that leaves the wrong impression with students, it is reported that a good teacher of hygiene recently prefaced a brief talk to college girls as follows: "I shall now consider a process that no cultured woman ever mentions except with bated breath. I refer to menstruation."
Abnormal teachers.
The second kind of people who should not teach sex-hygiene are the men and women who are the unfortunate victims of sexual abnormality, either physical or psychical, that more or less influences their outlook on life. Certain neurotic and hysterical men or women who lack thorough physiological training and whose own sexual disturbances have led them to devour omnivorously and unscientifically the psychopathological literature of sex by such authors as Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, and Freud, are probably unsafe teachers of sex-hygiene. Especially is this true of the women of this type whose introspective morbidity has led them to diagnose their own functional disturbances as the direct result of "over-sexuality" and restraint from normal sexual expression—a diagnosis that is probably wrong nine times in ten cases. Such a woman is a very dangerous teacher of sex-hygiene for adolescent girls; and a positive menace to older unmarried women who, if free from absorbing work, may spend their leisure in becoming more or less restless under the unsocial, if not unphysiologic, conditions of unwelcome celibacy. This is no imaginary danger. The reader of this will not be interested in details, but the author has received from physicians and others reliable information concerning several extremely abnormal women of the above-described type who are taking an active interest in the sex-instruction of young people and are actually suggesting to their friends among young women the dangerous and untrue doctrine that prolonged celibacy for women results in repressed sexuality that surely leads to ill health. Such ideas, it is true, are traceable to certain well-known radical writers on the psychopathology of sex; but we must remember that the great majority of physicians and other scientific investigators who have studied such problems refuse to believe that repressed sex instincts in either men or women do the harm that a few extremists have claimed. But even if it were known beyond the shadow of a doubt that repressed sex instincts may injure people, it would be unwise to intrust young people to instruction by teachers who have a hypochondriacal interest in such a doctrine of repression. Such suggestions can do only harm to the vast majority of persons who receive them. To say the least, it is unfortunate that the psychopathology of sex has become so widely circulated among those who are not well trained in physiology and psychiatry.
Teachers who emphasize sexual abnormality.
The third kind of people who should not be intrusted with teaching sex-hygiene are the men and women who, without a scientific perspective, have plunged into the literature of sexual abnormality until they have come to think that knowledge concerning perverted life is an important part of sex-education for young people, especially for those of post-adolescent years. I know of teachers and physicians who advise young people not much over twenty years of age to read such psychopathological works as those of Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, and Freud, and various works dealing with commercialized vice. Here is a grave danger. The less that people without professional use for knowledge of sexual pathology know concerning it, the better it will be for their peace of mind and possibly for their morals. Therefore, I urge that he who enthusiastically studies the abnormalities of sex life without reference to scientific research or professional demands, is not likely to be the kind of teacher who will present abnormal life only so far as is necessary to an understanding of the perfectly normal.
Pessimistic teachers.
The fourth kind of people who ought not to instruct the young in personal problems of sex-hygiene are the men and women whose own unhappy romances or married life, or whose knowledge of vice conditions, have made them pessimistic concerning sex-problems. There are in our schools and colleges to-day some such men and many such women, and there will be danger for young people when the growing freedom of expression allows these sexual pessimists to impress their own hopeless philosophy of sex upon students. The educational world does not need such teachers, but rather those who can follow the late Dr. Morrow in seeing a bright side of life that almost dispels the darkness of sexual errors.