The suppression of economic knowledge, disastrous as it is, is quite
intelligible, its corrupt motive being as clear as the motive of a
burglar for concealing his jemmy from a policeman. But the other great
suppression in our schools, the suppression of the subject of sex, is a
case of taboo. In mankind, the lower the type, and the less cultivated
the mind, the less courage there is to face important subjects
objectively. The ablest and most highly cultivated people continually
discuss religion, politics, and sex: it is hardly an exaggeration to say
that they discuss nothing else with fully-awakened interest. Commoner
and less cultivated people, even when they form societies for
discussion, make a rule that politics and religion are not to be
mentioned, and take it for granted that no decent person would attempt
to discuss sex. The three subjects are feared because they rouse the
crude passions which call for furious gratification in murder and rapine
at worst, and, at best, lead to quarrels and undesirable states of
consciousness.
Even when this excuse of bad manners, ill temper, and brutishness (for
that is what it comes to) compels us to accept it from those adults
among whom political and theological discussion does as a matter of fact
lead to the drawing of knives and pistols, and sex discussion leads to
obscenity, it has no application to children except as an imperative
reason for training them to respect other people's opinions, and to
insist on respect for their own in these as in other important matters
which are equally dangerous: for example, money. And in any case
there are decisive reasons; superior, like the reasons for
suspending conventional reticences between doctor and patient, to all
considerations of mere decorum, for giving proper instruction in the
facts of sex. Those who object to it (not counting coarse people who
thoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading a
fictitious delicacy) are, in effect, advocating ignorance as a safeguard
against precocity. If ignorance were practicable there would be
something to be said for it up to the age at which ignorance is a danger
instead of a safeguard. Even as it is, it seems undesirable that any
special emphasis should be given to the subject, whether by way of
delicacy and poetry or too impressive warning. But the plain fact is
that in refusing to allow the child to be taught by qualified unrelated
elders (the parents shrink from the lesson, even when they are otherwise
qualified, because their own relation to the child makes the subject
impossible between them) we are virtually arranging to have our children
taught by other children in guilty secrets and unclean jests. And that
settles the question for all sensible people.
The dogmatic objection, the sheer instinctive taboo which rules the
subject out altogether as indecent, has no age limit. It means that
at no matter what age a woman consents to a proposal of marriage, she
should do so in ignorance of the relation she is undertaking. When this
actually happens (and apparently it does happen oftener than would seem
possible) a horrible fraud is being practiced on both the man and the
woman. He is led to believe that she knows what she is promising, and
that he is in no danger of finding himself bound to a woman to whom
he is eugenically antipathetic. She contemplates nothing but such
affectionate relations as may exist between her and her nearest kinsmen,
and has no knowledge of the condition which, if not foreseen, must come
as an amazing revelation and a dangerous shock, ending possibly in the
discovery that the marriage has been an irreparable mistake. Nothing can
justify such a risk. There may be people incapable of understanding that
the right to know all there is to know about oneself is a natural human
right that sweeps away all the pretences of others to tamper with one's
consciousness in order to produce what they choose to consider a good
character. But they must here bow to the plain mischievousness of
entrapping people into contracts on which the happiness of their whole
lives depends without letting them know what they are undertaking.