There is a further danger to which I must refer, for it is one that, in
my opinion, is very active for disaster. I find a tendency among most
grown-ups, especially among teachers and advanced parents, who ought to
know better, to place too firm a reliance on moral teaching and sexual
enlightenment as a means of saving our daughters and our sons from
making the same mistakes in their lives that we ourselves have made.
Like those drowning in deep waters where they cannot swim, we have
clutched at any plank of hope. You see, so many of the old
planks--religion, social barriers, chaperons, home restrictions, and so
many more, on which our parents used to rely, have failed us, broken in
our hands by the vigorous destroying of the young generation, and,
therefore we have clutched with frantic fingers at this new fair-looking
life raft, in pursuit of the one aim to protect our children. Myself, I
have done this. It is with uttermost sadness I have to acknowledge now
that I do not believe we can help the young very far or deeply by all
our teaching. Not only do they want their own experience, not ours, but
it is right for them to have it. The urge of adolescence carries them
away out of our detaining hands.
But that is not to say we are to push them into dangers. I believe we
make the way too hard for the young with much of our nonsense about
liberty and not interfering. You know what happens in a garden where the
gardener does interfere with his hoe? I have been forced back, often
reluctantly, into accepting the necessity of boundaries. I want right
conduct to be defined, and defined widely with possible paths, so that
the young may have a chance of finding their way.
We have, I am sure, to set up new conventions, establish fresh sanctions
and accept prohibitions, to rebuild our broken ramparts and render safe
and pleasant the city within. Do we fail to do this, we leave the young
to stumble among the ruins we have made. And do not let us be hypocrites
and profess surprise when they fall. The knowledge we are forcing on
them, often against their desire, will not save them. With all our
efforts we can but teach them intellectually; a form of knowledge,
which shatters like thin glass, with a very slight blow, when it comes
in contact with the emotions. Thus I am driven back to the truth,
established already in an earlier essay, that the one sure way to
deliver the young from evil is to lessen their temptations.
You see hidden sin is always more attractive than open sin; for one
thing, it is easier to begin, and the beginning of sin is usually
drifting; secrecy also supplies adventure, and the excitement that is
desired by the young so passionately in the dullness of life.