The Social Emergency Part 5

The chief problem of this part of the education is the accurate and timely adaptation of what is taught to the needs of the successive periods of development. Hence chronological or "calendar" age and school grade are both unreliable guides to the educator: a group of fifteen-year-old boys, or of eighth grade boys, includes some who are children not yet entered upon p.u.b.escence, others who are mature,--that is, have attained the power of reproduction,--and still others who are in process of change. These three groups cannot be treated identically; each period has its own peculiar needs. The problem of sorting out the individuals and meeting the needs of each group is difficult because of our traditional neglect of the whole task. But of any particular lesson we may agree with him who says, "Better a year too early than an hour too late."

The earliest safeguard, rather regimen than instruction, is the inculcation of the idea and habit of "Hands off" the s.e.x organs. The little child is taught this by his mother, and it becomes second nature.

The pre-p.u.b.escent boy and girl may receive some slight but impressive additional perception as to the danger of meddling in any way. They should also be warned strictly against any other person who offers to tamper with their s.e.x organs or adjacent parts of the body. Let them understand that they are justified in any means of defense, the fist, a club, or a stone; and that the offender is forever d.a.m.ned by his act and must never again be trusted; and, of course, that they should at once lay the whole case before their parents or other persons in authority.

The special instruction of the pre-p.u.b.escent and p.u.b.escent periods is as yet by no means fully agreed upon among experts. We can give here only a few points that seem fairly clear.

(1) Girls should know in advance enough of the general facts of menstruation so that the onset of the period may not cause, as it now does in thousands of cases, shock and sometimes dangerous errors of conduct.

They should also know that the s.e.xual nature of men is active and aggressive instead of pa.s.sive and defensive as in the woman; and that hence the woman must in general take the leading part in the control of the s.e.xual relation, or, at least, of those preliminary intimacies that tend to culminate in s.e.xual union. If it be contended that this is a delicate and difficult idea to convey, liable to be exaggerated and to produce false att.i.tudes, the answer is that if difficulty is to deter us we may as well stop the whole task of s.e.x education before we begin; and moreover that the disasters now resulting from ignorance are ten times worse than any probable results of instruction.

This s.e.xual difference means not only that the girl must be intolerant of improper advances, but also that for her own sake and that of her sister women she must beware of conduct, att.i.tudes, or forms of dress that tend unduly to excite the s.e.xual impulses in boys and men.

In view of the enormous morbidity and mortality inflicted upon innocent women and their children by s.e.xual disease, the girl should learn the main facts concerning the nature, effects, and incidence of gonorrhea and syphilis. Health certificates of prospective bridegrooms will probably be more easily enforced if such intelligence becomes general. The time for such instruction is difficult to state, and would vary with the social environment; probably late adolescence would be early enough in most cases; earlier information is indispensable for girls who by reason of their economic or social status are peculiarly exposed to s.e.xual temptation and danger.

Training for motherhood, a great gap in our educational system, is a closely related theme, of incomparable importance, but beyond the scope of this work.

(2) Boys should learn early the rewards of continence: that the conservation of the s.e.xual secretions is the indispensable condition of manly growth in stature, muscular powers, voice, heart, and brain. They should learn the possibility and healthiness of continence--always understanding that mental continence is the prerequisite of physical continence.

They should know in good time that nocturnal emissions are quite normal, when not too frequent, and indicate not lost manhood or the danger of it, but merely the fact that the s.e.xual glands are now for the first time all developed and active. This is one of the simplest and most commonplace facts in the whole range of s.e.x knowledge, yet, through ignorance of it, unknown mult.i.tudes of boys have suffered anxiety sometimes amounting to terror, have become moody and dejected, lost interest in work and studies; and finally thousands of them, ashamed to ask counsel or enlightenment from any decent source, have had recourse to the venereal quack, who so artfully spreads his snares for them in daily paper and widely circulated pamphlet. Once the victim is in his hands there is almost no limit to the evil that may result.[38] High-school princ.i.p.als tell of watching the faces of their boys during a lecture on s.e.x hygiene and noting the visible signs of relief and new hope when the lecturer explained the true nature and meaning of emissions.

So far as the so-called "s.e.xual necessity" is concerned, let boys understand that it is unknown among animals; that its completest embodiment is found in degenerates and imbeciles; and that athletes, thinkers, priests, scholars, warriors, the finest men of every type, hold their pa.s.sions strictly subject to their wills. Let them know that the world is well supplied with wretches whom this very "s.e.xual necessity" has robbed of their precious virile powers, but that the cases of impotence through chast.i.ty are certainly unproved and probably non-existent except in the imagination of people who want to believe in them. And finally that numberless fathers of big healthy families were as chaste as the wives who bore their children.

Boys should learn that the man who insists on premarital s.e.xual necessity has two roads open to him--one that of the libertine and seducer, the most contemptible of creatures; the other that of the wh.o.r.e-follower, whom nature perpetually menaces with vile and pestilential plagues, making him a misery to himself and menace to all clean persons who a.s.sociate with him, especially his future wife and unborn children.

This involves, at least for the present state of society, some information regarding the two chief venereal diseases: that all prost.i.tutes, professional or otherwise, are sooner or later infected, and that no reglementation can give security. They should know something of the horrors of syphilis, its loathsomeness, its extraordinary power to penetrate to the physiological Holy of Holies, poison the germ cells, and d.a.m.n in advance the unborn children of its victim. They must know the fatal treachery of gonorrhea: how it lurks unsuspected in the victim who supposes himself cured, and strikes, like a bolt out of clear sky, blinding newborn infants, and robbing innocent wives of motherhood, health, or life itself.

To object to this instruction because it is gruesome, or because it may seem like intimidation, is sentimentalism: in this matter, as elsewhere in the realm of knowledge, the truth should scare no one who does not need to be scared. It is better to be safe than sorry; and it is better to be scared than syphilitic. "I dare do all that may become a man," says Macbeth; "who dares do more is none"; let a man dare if he will with his own body, aye, his own soul; he is but a coward who does not shrink from buying voluptuous moments with the hazard of wife and child. Hydrophobia is far less perilous than venereal disease, and if one hundredth as many were attacked by it the world would be placarded with scarlet danger signs; the man who decried the precautions as intimidation would be shut up in a home for imbeciles. If this is intimidation, let us have more of it.

Above all, boys should learn the beauty and glory of the true relation of the s.e.xes; the bond of love and unity between man and woman truly married--in soul as well as body. As he cherishes and vindicates the honor of his father and mother and sisters, so should he be taught to use his intelligence and heart to hold sacred in youth the powers and functions that will enable him to become in turn husband and father, to give a clean soul and body in marriage to a pure woman, and to pa.s.s on the germ of life to the children of his body. A few lessons on heredity will show him that he is but the steward of an inheritance that has come down from a thousand ancestors and may well be perpetuated through generations to come.

Prudence is good; but no narrow selfish motive will meet the need. The lad who is "good" merely for the sake of his own skin is usually a poor creature; the finest lad--who might perhaps hazard his own individual fate--will refuse to gamble with the souls and bodies of those others who shall be his own flesh and blood. No virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic: and only altruism is truly enthusiastic.

The boy and girl, now young man and young woman, must both learn that prost.i.tution is a social sin:[39] the "scarlet woman" has been truly called the eternal priestess bearing the sins of humanity. This is a vast theme; we have got beyond the realm of mere s.e.x education;--but truth is one, and life is one, and neither logic nor humanity will consent to our stopping short of the whole truth. Social intelligence--the illumination of man's life with man--the scientific and spiritual comprehension of the apostolic dictum, "We are all members one of another"--and "if one member suffer, all members suffer with it"--these are the great arrears of education. But there never was a time when the spirit of man moved so rapidly forward as here and now, and the movement for s.e.x education is but one striking phase of the great advance.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] An examination of tables of contents and indexes of standard school texts in nature study and biology will reveal the almost universal absence of all ideas relating to s.e.x and reproduction. There are two or three recent exceptions.

[31] G. Stanley Hall, _Educational Problems_, vol. I, pp. 388-97, Thomson and Geddes, _Problems of s.e.x_, pp. 5-17.

[32] Thomson and Geddes, _op. cit._, pp. 46-52; Saleeby, _Parenthood and Race Culture_; Morrow, _Social Diseases and Marriage; Hall, Educational Problems_, vol. I, pp. 424-43.

[33] Fisher, _National Vitality_; Hall, _Youth_, chaps. II, V, VI, XII.

[34] "What makes a Magazine?" _Twentieth Century Magazine_, September, 1912, pp. 11-20; _The Exploitation of Pleasure._ Russell Sage Foundation.

[35] See Mrs. Woodallen Chapman, _The Moral Problem of the Children_, esp.

pp. 61-93. Also the chapter in this book on the education of children.

[36] An epoch-marking book in this field is Miss Torelle's _Plant and Animal Children and How They Grow._ (Heath.) See also pamphlet, _The Origin of Life_, by R.E. Blount. (Scott, Foresman & Co.)

[37] "The Teaching of s.e.x in Schools and Colleges," _Social Diseases_, October, 1911. Addresses by G. Stanley Hall, Maurice A. Bigelow, Josiah Strong, Charles W. Eliot, and Mary Putnam Blount, _s.e.xual Reproduction in Animals: the Purpose and Methods of teaching it._ Proceedings N.E.A., 1912, pp. 1324-27.

[38] Hall, G.S., _Adolescence_, vol. I, pp. 459-62.

[39] Jane Addams, _A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil._

CHAPTER VIII

TEACHING PHASES: FOR CHILDREN

_By William Greenleaf Eliot, Jr._

My children when they were little were fascinated with a book which their mother used to read to them, called _Mother Nature and Her Helpers._ Each chapter or lesson was made up of interesting information and ideas suggested by the pictures. At the head of the first chapter was a picture of a mother sitting by a cradle with every surrounding and circ.u.mstance of humble, happy home life. Succeeding chapters were upon the cradle and the home of plants and animals. Ovaries of plants and nests of birds and squirrels were all set forth in terms of the child's experience of home life, home-building, home-protecting, and feeding the baby. Doubtless the design of the author was to lead the child to an understanding and appreciation of its own home life and love by showing it home life in its origins and elements. But an equally important implication lay in the fact that the child was brought into its intimacy with plant and animal life along the angle of its own human experience and of its own home ideals. After such an introduction to the homes of plants and animals, whenever it should seem best to apprise the child of the details of plant and animal reproduction, the additional facts would instantly find their places in close relation to facts already familiar and already related to his highest childish affections and ideals.

For the basis of s.e.xual instruction for a child should be the difference, not the similarity between man and animals. If the basis is made the similarity between man and animals, the child, as time goes on and as its own s.e.xual life increasingly awakens, may tend to imitate animals, may attempt to justify the natural and unrestrained promiscuousness of its own instincts, may justify unrestrained s.e.xual life in the name of nature as against the alleged artificialities of civilization. The basis must be human, not animal; moral, not biological.

Biology goes far to explain humanity, but the interpretation is found in the spiritual affections, experiences, and implications of family life.

The family life of animals is const.i.tuted of animal instinct freely followed. The family life of man would be ruined by the free following of animal instinct. There is a distinct danger in all so-called s.e.x instruction of children which makes plant and animal life the norm.

The definite and clean instruction of children in the physical facts of reproduction may rightly and wisely begin with the simple facts, anatomical and functional, of plants and animals; but it is important that a true philosophy lie back of this instruction. Man is not only a higher order of mammalia; he is a worshiper of G.o.d and capable of practicing his presence. And from this base our instruction to children, drawn from the anatomical and functional life of plants and animals, must always subserve the moral, the spiritual superiority of man and the human family.

The little child will understand and even idealize plant and animal life if he learns of plant and animal life first in human terms. His moral development is menaced if this process is reversed so that a counter-tendency is set up,--a tendency to interpret the human functions in animal terms. It is better for the child to humanize animal relationships than to animalize human relationships,--and this can be achieved only through a constant observance of the human basis in the s.e.xual as indeed in all phases of a child's education. The little book which I mentioned at the beginning does just this,--it introduces the child to the home life of animals, it interprets animal life in ideal terms. It lays a basis for relating later information of s.e.x functions to the home life of plants and animals. At the proper time in a child's development, he is prepared to place a true and intelligent value upon the differences between the home life of animals and the home life of human beings, and to justify intelligently and with full consent of mind and sanction of conscience the differences of s.e.xual practice as between plants and animals on the one hand and human beings on the other. He is prepared to see that it is enough for the s.e.x life of plants and animals that it be physically and biologically normal. It is not enough for the true and ideal family life of man that the s.e.x relation should be biologically normal. It must be morally normal--normal, that is, to the highest human interests.

The more concrete and detailed problems of method would not be serious if every child's mind were a blank or even if its instincts were a.n.a.logous to normal animals. But neither is the case, and the problem of method and means of instruction is therefore amazingly complicated. If the s.e.x life of a child were a.n.a.logous to that of normal animals, it would not awaken at all until p.u.b.erty. And if the child's mind were a blank on s.e.x matters, it need only be kept from the invasion of wrong ideas from outside. But the s.e.x life of a child begins long before p.u.b.erty,--both physically and mentally. In the child, the physical signs are more or less detached from the mental signs,--at this or that phase of a child's life, the one or the other may have precedence; but the two are subtly interrelated, and tend to contribute to each other. In the human being a s.e.x life that is normal, both biologically and morally, is an achievement; not a thing which would take care of itself if the child were left alone and merely kept ignorant of the abnormal. The human child is born abnormal,--that is to say, with latent possibilities of s.e.xual abnormality, physical and mental,--and this by virtue of the mere fact that he is not only with animals a creature of instinct, but with humanity a being with ideas.

This statement is doubtless oftener true of the s.e.x life of boy children than of girl children; but it is a fact and a very important fact, and it lies at the bottom of the problem when we come to consider the details of instructional method. If it were not for these facts, it would make no difference who imparted s.e.x information to the child, so the facts were accurately told; and it would make no difference what facts were given, or at what age the child received them, if no lies were conveyed. But because the child's physical and mental s.e.x life awakens early, and because every child has latent tendencies to abnormality and latent responsiveness to the abnormal, it is of critical importance that we decide who shall teach the individual child, when the child shall be informed, and what the child shall be told. It is of critical importance because, if the instruction comes wrongly, we may, even with good intentions, contribute to the very abnormality that we wish to forefend or overcome. With some children we could perhaps safely take chances so far as the self-awakening s.e.x life is concerned if we did not know that it is impossible, without more harm than good to keep the child from such perfectly normal relations with other children as almost certainly will expose it to disastrous misinformation a suggestion.

Whatever ought to be said of the importance of the home tradition and ideals and the general physical and moral regimen of the child (and these are of supreme importance), the facts of the last two paragraphs lay the ground for this general statement: that in the case of a child whose moral and s.e.xual environment has been bad and perverting, proper s.e.x instruction cannot make matters worse, whereas in the best families much harm may arise from the lack of such instruction.

If any information is imparted to the child at all, the first instruction should properly come from one or other of the child's parents. It is sometimes the case that opportunity for the first information is presented when the child asks questions. And the supposed question of the child is, "Where did the baby come from?" Our course would be much smoother if every child asked its mother or father this question, or if every child began with this particular question, or if every child asked any question at all. Sometimes the child asks the nurse this question; sometimes the child is an only child or for some other reason this question never occurs to it; sometimes the child's first question pertains to some curiosity about its own navel, or "where eggs come from," or "why the hen makes them," or "how they get into the hen," or what is meant by "half shepherd and half St. Bernard." But children do not ask the questions that the books say they ask, and ready-made answers do not always apply.

Whether a child asks the conventional questions or the unexpected questions, and whether it asks questions or not, the parent ought to have some pretty definite notion of when, what, and how to tell a child. A child's questions about the baby should be answered truthfully; all such replies as escape by the stork, cabbage-patch, or grocer-boy route should be avoided. It goes without saying that children's questions should be met seriously and even reverently, and that parents should never speak of nor allude lightly, jokingly, or irreverently to s.e.x relationships in the child's presence.

A child may ask a question prematurely, or at a time when the parent finds it impossible to answer in such a way as to make the desired impression or to avoid the undesirable impression. The postponement should be frankly a postponement, and the parent should answer the question at some later time chosen by the parent and upon the parent's own motion. If the child never affords the parent a natural opening for the first or later conversation, the parent should make the opening by reference to the recent arrival of a baby in the child's home, or in some neighbor's family, or even to the arrival of kittens or chicks.

Such preliminary information should come at or near the first asking of questions, or if no questions are asked, at any convenient time between the ages of six and eight years, and in any case before the child goes to school or mingles much away from home with other children. It is a mistake to suppose that very much need be said to the young child. If the child's normal curiosity is satisfied in a clean way from the right source, that is sufficient. Especially should it be advised of the truth about those facts concerning which it is liable be misinformed in its contacts with other children. Only, parents ought to remember that their child, however carefully brought up and protected, at any time and of its own motion, may itself be that corrupting "other child" against which we are so sedulously warned!

Or, again, the child when it has been duly instructed by parents may without harmful intentions talk too freely with other children. It may do some harm to other children in this; but what is more likely, it may receive harm by calling out uninformed and hurtful conversation from the other side. For this reason, a parent in talking to children should be careful to explain that they should not talk to others. If they are properly brought-up children, their modesty will respond, and their trained obedience will keep faith.

This is the place to try to make clear the importance of such secrecy and confidence between parents and child. There is a secrecy which adds a glamour of pleasurable naughtiness, leading straight to prudery and pruriency with all their consequences. Such secrecy is the sort that develops when parents do take the child into their confidence. Such harmful secrecy is not to be confounded with the confidence between parent and child. In opposing the harmful kind of secrecy, there are those who very wrongly, as I believe, object to any secrecy; who say, "All things are clean; why should any difference whatever be made between the lungs or the stomach, and the s.e.x organs; it is often the very making of any distinction that causes and helps cause all the trouble." Now the case against all secrecy would be valid if the premises of the argument were sound. Roughly speaking, lungs are lungs, and stomachs are stomachs, but the s.e.x organs and their impulses, reflexes, and irradiations are connected with the subtlest complexes of mind and affections, inextricably connected with everything human, with further irradiations into the entire social body.

By all that makes it important to prevent the private and mutual secrecies of children, by so much and ten times more is it important to establish confidential secrecy between parent and child. For in so doing, you not only prevent the undesirable secrecy, but you build normally on modesty; you lay foundations for a true sense of shame, disgust, and disgrace; and in doing so, set up one of the strong defenses against perversions and prurient allurement and seduction.

Prudery should be made impossible and true modesty conserved by proper secrecy in s.e.x matters, and back of that by the proper att.i.tude, conversation, and practice in the child's familiar domestic functions.

Prudery and modesty must not be confounded; for by as much as we condemn the one, ought we to value the other.