The number of persons who refuse to concede the usefulness of sex education is far greater than we imagine. Most parents and educators consider that the mere scientific explanation of the secret of love threatens to corrupt the imagination of the young and lead it astray. For my part, I hold that ignorance is not purity: it is an error, or at the very least a negligence, which can lead to the gravest of consequences. It is well known that sex education brings great difficulties, but these difficulties must not deter us. And I hasten to say: the scientific explanations that are the basis of all sex education must be undertaken with the same frankness with girls as with boys. The modern girl is no longer the innocent lamb she was in the old days. She enjoys a freedom equal to that of her comrades of the strong sex, and she must be their equal in armament. The concealment of the fundamental facts of sexual life from children is due not only to hypocrisy and cowardice; most often it results from the ignorance of parents and educators. The incompetence of grown-ups in this domain makes the young lose all confidence in them: they avoid them and give up hope of speaking frankly with them — whereas, had they obtained counsel, they would have been enlightened and made safe.
The famous judge Ben Lindsey, one of the great specialists in the analysis of juvenile crime and in sex education, tells us the following story:
... "One day a schoolgirl scarcely fifteen years of age visited him, and confided to him that a man had asked her to be his mistress. She said: I have come to you for
advice, for I dare not consult my parents, since they would answer me with nothing but shouting and ill treatment. Yet I want to know... does any of us give up his will to think for himself, by himself? I want to know your opinion, and if your counsels please me I shall follow them."
There is no doubt that the judge found no difficulty in making the girl understand what dangers awaited her from that venture, and what inevitably grave consequences follow from a sexual life entered upon before its time.
The child's sex education must begin at his adolescence, at the time when he begins to receive his first sensations of the world that surrounds him. And whoever would educate a child must, before all else, know him. Perhaps these words are so self-evident as to seem banal. Yet they are far from describing what generally happens. Many parents and many educators do not take the trouble to study the child for whose education they are responsible.
In their eyes a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl, and nothing further. They overlook the fine distinctions and the endless gradations created by heredity, which form the child's sexual personality. I do not know how to draw attention sufficiently to the importance of this "sexual personality." To my mind it is fundamental and of very great importance, for it is, in the end, what directs and determines the future growth of the human being.
Here follow some directives to be observed as rules for the first years of childhood:
1 — Avoid mixing in the sleeping quarters, whatever the cost. 2 — Do not make the clothing markedly different between the two sexes; I think the ancients were right in prescribing the same dress for girls and boys up to the age of adolescence.
3 — Do not try to make of your son of five or six years a ridiculous "little man," or to give him an inflated idea of his own person at the expense of his little sister.
4 — Do not plant in your children's souls the spirit of shame and the fear of nakedness; develop in them, rather, the opposite instinct: namely, that everything natural is pure and beautiful. And if the mere sight of nakedness is not harmful, the sight of sexual relations between grown-ups — should the child chance to see them — can strike his feelings a blow whose effect nothing can undo.
The importance of these directives shows itself especially in the case of children disposed by nature to certain characteristics common to both sexes, or to certain faults of adolescents — the solitary habit, for example. In the latter case above all, the bad inclination should be corrected with patience and gentleness, not with alarm and intimidation, as — alas — so often happens.
We have heard a great deal about "troubled puberty," and I need not dwell long upon its many manifestations and complications. There are endless degrees of what they call "the malady of youth": from excessive states of feeling and acute passing agitation — which in itself is no more than natural — to sexual neurosis (*), that phenomenon of lost balance which threatens to take more dangerous forms later on. This imbalance appears most often in children afflicted with premature adolescence.
The children's courts — as I noted above — have had to consider crimes and offenses resulting, for the most part, from a maturing swifter than the natural. The imagination of these
(*) Neurosis: a psychological term meaning the abiding psychic malady, as distinct from the passing psychic crisis.
children is overflowing, extravagant, and sensual, and it is reflected in their conduct most of the time. Here are some examples drawn from my long experience:
"The principal of a public school wrote to the parents of a pupil ten years of age, asking them to