SCHOOL INSTRUCTION IN SEX HYGIENE
BY CHARLES W. ELIOT
President Emeritus of Harvard College.
In order to make head against the horrible evils which accompany men’s
profligacy and women’s prostitution, and to prevent the moral and
physical disasters which result from young men’s and young women’s
ignorance about the natural processes of reproduction in the human
species and about the laws of health in those processes, it is
indispensable that systematic instruction should be given to all young
children and young people in the processes of reproduction and growth in
plants and animals, in the general rules of hygiene, in the natural,
wholesome processes of reproduction in the human species, and at last in
the diseases and social disorders which follow violations of nature’s
laws concerning the relations of the sexes. The bitter experience of the
Christian world in regard to the venereal diseases and their
consequences demonstrated this proposition.
=Policy of silence a failure.=--Wherever anyone undertakes to discuss this
subject in public, he is met by two adverse opinions which are firmly
held by multitudes of well-meaning people. The first is the opinion that
these are unclean subjects, about which the less said the better. This
is the policy of silence concerning all sexual relations and processes,
natural or unnatural, rightful or sinful, which has prevailed for
centuries in both barbarous and civilized countries. There is but one
thing to be said about this policy of silence, namely, that it has
failed, everywhere and always. It has not prevented the spread and
increase of sexual wrong-doing and of the horrible resultant diseases,
degradations, and destructions. For the prevention and eradication of
any great social or governmental wrong, publicity, discussion, and the
awakening of a righteous public sentiment in the great mass of the
people concerned have always been, and always must be, necessary.
=Parents as instructors.=--The second adverse opinion is that the
necessary instruction on these subjects should be given to children and
young persons by their parents and by them alone. This opinion is sound
to this extent, that in cultivated and refined families, in which the
parents possess sufficient knowledge of the whole subject, the needed
instruction will best come to the children through the mother and the
father, beginning at a tender age. All children ask questions on this
subject. Their curiosity is roused early, and is usually very pointedly
expressed. The asking of questions should invariably be the mother’s
precious opportunity to describe to the child, with delicacy and
reserve, but truthfully, the mother’s part in the production of the
human infant. By so doing, the mother will establish a new bond between
herself and child, and will acquire a strong claim on its abiding
affection. Every father competent for the task should see that his boys
understand the natural and wholesome process of reproduction, and the
great physical dangers which accompany violations of the moral law in
this respect. He should see that they know that continence is absolutely
healthy, and, indeed, is indispensable to the highest attainment in
bodily strength and endurance. He should make sure that his boys
understand what honor requires of a man in his relation to women, and
that chastity is just as admirable and feasible in a man as in a woman,
and just as necessary for the protection of family life and the
eradication of the very worst evils which now degrade and poison
civilized society. It is quite true that all this instruction will come
best, whenever possible, from loving fathers and mothers to their own
offspring; because it will then be given intimately, privately, and
with tenderness and purity.
Inasmuch, however, as the great majority of parents do not now possess
the necessary knowledge, or the faculty of expression necessary for
imparting it, and there are many families that have lost father, mother,
or both, society must for the present rely in the main on the schools to
give this instruction, which is, indeed, indispensable for the salvation
of civilization.
=School can teach nature’s sex laws.=--It is, however, a very serious
problem, how to give the needed instruction in sex hygiene in all the
schools, public, private, and endowed. No one is competent to-day to lay
down a fixed and final program. The programs for this subject must be
experimental or tentative for many years to come. All that can be done
at present is to indicate the general lines of the promising experiments
on this difficult subject. Innumerable experimenters must in time work
out the details with insight, patience, and skill. The general lines
may, however, be laid down with a reasonable degree of confidence. They
are as follows:
1. It is through the ample and prolonged teaching of natural history
that the necessary knowledge is to be conveyed to the children,
beginning at tender years with the teaching of botany, and going on to
the elements of zoölogy, both subjects being taught in the most
concrete manner possible with incessant illustrations indoors and
out-of-doors, not during the whole school year, but at those seasons
when adequate illustrations and demonstrations are most feasible and
convenient. This instruction should be associated in all schools with
the teaching of pure and applied geography, and in rural schools with
the teaching of agriculture.
2. Throughout this long course of natural history instruction
demonstrations of the various modes of transmitting life should
frequently occur, the transmission of life being the highest and
ultimate bodily function of every plant and every animal, including man.
There is a great body of fresh knowledge on this subject waiting to be
given to children and youth, all of it capable of demonstration through
the senses, aided or unaided, and all supplying admirable training for
eye and hand. Thus, all the various processes of reproducing plant-life
by the division of a cell, by the creation of new independent cells, by
the shooting or rooting of some part of a plant to create an independent
plant, as by bulbs, tubers, or even parts of a stalk or leaf, by the
union of two cells, or the fertilization of one cell by another
cell,--all these processes can be made intensely interesting to a child;
and such instruction can be spread through several years at appropriate
seasons without ever leaving the vegetable kingdom. In flowering plants
the fertilization of the embryo-sac by pollen may be illustrated in
operations which the children themselves can perform. The carrying of
pollen from one flower to another by insects or by the wind emphasizes
the general fact that plants are fixed while animals have motion. The
bi-sexual structure of plants is in itself a fascinating subject of
study for children and youths; and through it all runs the thought that
Nature provides elaborately and beautifully for the precious
transmission of life. In later years of the school course the diverse
methods of reproduction in animals will afford a long course of
instruction, involving the structure and function of many different
sorts of animals, and of many different kinds of reproductive organs.
The innumerable devices for effecting fecundation and for feeding the
embryo, and the various arrangements for feeding the young and bringing
up families, afford an endless variety of interesting subjects for
observation and discussion. The nesting habits of birds and their care
of offspring are highly instructive and easy to exhibit. Here again the
main object of study should be infinite variety and elaboration of
nature’s processes for the transmission of life. These subjects, if
properly taught with collecting box, scalpel, microscope, and paper and
pencil, are just as pure and innocent for children under thirteen as
chemistry and physics are. There is nothing sensual or unclean about
them, nothing which does not tell of order, purpose, inventiveness,
adaptation, coöperation, and achievement. Through much of the botanical
instruction and more of the zoölogical runs the thought that the
transmission of life requires two individuals of different quality.
Children should be made thoroughly acquainted with this principle before
any sexual emotions begin to stir in them.
3. =Avoid venereal diseases by frankness.=--If strong foundations have
been laid through these botanical and zoölogical studies before the age
of puberty, it will not be difficult to take up in secondary schools the
study of the normal functions of the human body in health, of the
perturbations caused by some of the common diseases, of the sources or
causes of disease, including the recognized contagions and the modes of
infection, of the means of resisting disease and producing immunity, and
finally of the functions of government in regard to preventive medicine
and the means of promoting the public health.
Among the contagions which ought to be described and illustrated should
be included the contagions of syphilis and gonorrhea, from which proceed
some of the most horrible evils which afflict modern society, evils not
fully known except to physicians, and by many ordinary people,
particularly women, quite unsuspected. All young men and women should be
well informed on these subjects before they leave their secondary
schools; but from the time of entrance to secondary schools all such
instruction should be given separately to girls by women and to boys by
men.
Since the great majority of American children never enter the secondary
schools, the general rules concerning cleanliness, diet, fresh air, and
the elementary facts on sex hygiene should be stated concisely and
frankly to all children just before they reach the age-limit of
compulsory education.
4. =Emphasize bodily and mental purity.=--All schools should teach
explicitly in due season those elements of good manners and customs
which have to do with health and the preservations of bodily and mental
purity. They should teach habitual cleanliness of the body and
particularly of the hands and face, point out the importance of this
cleanliness as regards clothes, furniture and utensils, and the reasons
for keeping the dwelling free from dust, dirt, insects and vermin. They
should show the reasons for avoiding contact with, or close approach to,
persons who are unclean or who are suffering from colds, sores, coughs,
fevers, or any other illness. They should point out the dangers of
losing self-control through the use, even the rare use, of alcohol or of
drugs which take strong effect on the nervous system. They should
discountenance rough or boisterous play between boys and girls or young
men and young women, and teach each sex to avoid, in general, bodily
contact with persons of the opposite sex. Delicacy and reserve are parts
of good manners; but they are also highly protective qualities. On the
other hand, a coarse familiarity between the sexes is not only bad
manners, but a real provocation to wrong-doing, particularly when it is
accompanied by an ignorance which leaves young people without protection
against the love of excitement and reckless adventure. All these are
elements of good manners and right habits which should be universally
taught in the schools of a democracy to promote morality as well as
courtesy. Some of them, but rarely all, are taught in many good homes,
but for the great mass of the people the public schools inculcate them
by direct teaching, and by the indirect influence of good example. To a
high degree, good manners spring from and express morals. Such
instruction would naturally be associated with the teaching of natural
history and general hygiene.
Finally, all young people should have been taught in home, school and
Sunday school, before they are liable to fall into sexual sins, that
chastity in men is just as necessary as chastity in women for the
security, honor and happiness of family life, that continence is
absolutely healthy for both sexes, that men’s profligacy is the cause or
source of women’s prostitution with all its awful consequences to the
guilty parties and to the innocent human beings who are infected by the
guilty, and that the most precious joys and most durable satisfactions
of life are put at fearful risk by sexual immorality. Does anyone
protest that this educational process will abolish innocence in young
manhood and womanhood, and make matter of common talk the tenderest and
most intimate concerns in human life, let him consider that virtue, not
innocence, is manifestly God’s object and end for humanity, and that
the only alternative for education in sex hygiene is the prolongation
of the present awful wrongs and woes in the very vitals of
civilization.--_Journal of Education._ Read before the American School
Hygiene Association, New York City.