ADOLESCENCE
The honour of coming here was embittered by the difficulty of deciding what to say and how to say it. One of the hardest of all subjects, adolescence, was given to me: with this added hardship, that I was to consider it as something which may be reconstructed in the near future; or as a problem which we may somehow solve. It needs more than a man to understand adolescence: it needs, at the very least, a Royal Commission. I do not understand, really understand, anybody except myself; indeed, I do not thoroughly understand even me. One thing, to begin with, I did know about adolescence. I knew that it was a Latin word. So I looked it up in the Latin dictionary. And there I found to my surprise that the ancients were not agreed as to the term of adolescence. Varro reckons it from the 15th to the 30th year of life. Cicero speaks of Crassus, at 34, as adolescent: he even uses the word of Brutus and Cassius, when they were 40; and, what is most unexpected of all, he uses it of himself, in the year of his Consulship, when he was 44. Nothing could be more incorrigibly middle-aged than Cicero at 44; nothing could be more finally settled beyond all possibility of unsettlement. We cannot discuss adolescence, if it is to include persons of that standing.
Shall we therefore put this word back in the Latin dictionary, and speak not of adolescence but of youth? But the word youth hardly takes into account the bodily changes which occur between childhood and adult life. We are concerned here with the schoolroom years, the threshold years, say, from 14 to 18. All of us, when we think seriously about boys and girls from 14 to 18 years old, have at the back of our minds the thought of sex. And you must forgive me, if I use very plain words this evening: for I hope and believe that you will prefer, from a man of my profession, plain speaking to roundabout phrases.
My theme is adolescence: I have no right to talk about small children. But how can I help myself? Boys and girls begin to be vaguely conscious of sex, long before they are 14; some of them get into unclean habits, or say unclean things, when they are nearer to 4 than they are to 14; indeed, they may get into unclean habits before they are 4. If we are to understand the schoolroom, we must first understand the nursery. Children, by the time that they are 14, are what those 14 years have made them, with our assistance, or with our neglect.
But, as all of us are well aware, no two children are exactly alike in this matter. The differences between them are finely graduated; but the extremes of difference are miles apart. Some children are wholly incurious about sex; some are slightly inquisitive, some are very inquisitive, and some, but very few, not one in a thousand, are downright vicious and obsessed.
We are too ready, it may be, to give all our praise to those who are wholly incurious; we call them healthy-minded, pure-minded, and so forth. We admire them because they take no interest in this part of their natural life, just as we admire them because they take no interest in the working of their brains and their digestive organs. But there is nothing very admirable in this blank indifference toward the affairs of the body; it is good common sense, but we ought to think twice before we regard it as a virtue: it is altogether negative, and virtues are something positive. We can safely afford to keep some of our admiration for the children who are inquisitive. Besides, we have no business to put the possession of sex on a level with the possession of digestive organs. The facts of digestion are merely physiological: you can take them or leave them. The facts of sex are not merely physiological: and it is perilous, either to take them or to leave them.
Of course, the incurious child is more easy to talk to, more easy to get on with, than the inquisitive child; but we can hardly wish all boys and girls from 14 to 18 to remain thus childish in their knowledge of themselves. I do not believe that what we call “innocence” is any sure protection to boys or to girls against impure or perverted ways in adolescence. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that innocence, or ignorance, may even betray them instead of protecting them.