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Updated: July 6, 2025
Many parents who believe in sex-education for their children hold that the mothers should give all necessary hygienic guidance and teach the elementary facts of life to the children of both sexes in the pre-adolescent years, but that with the dawn of adolescence the girls should continue to be instructed by their mothers, while the boys should be guided by their fathers.
In fact, the way is very often left open to an immoral interpretation. All such literature certainly tends to work against the aims of sex-education. Perhaps parents and teachers may coöperate to keep much of this kind of literature out of the hands of young people, but the safest procedure is in cultivating taste for literature that does teach helpful lessons of life.
In addition to the ethical-social bearings of biological teaching, our sex-education will be incomplete until we learn how to attack the sex problems directly and effectively with reference to the ethical, social, psychical, and æsthetic aspects.
A conservative and rational answer to the above question whether sex-education can solve the problem of social diseases, is that a large percentage of even civilized people are not yet ready to have their most powerful instincts controlled by scientific knowledge.
It is, therefore, impossible to believe that there is any danger of sex-education disappearing. Of course, we have not reached a permanent system of sex-education. There certainly will be vast changes in our approved subject matter and methods of teaching; but the main idea of the sex-education movement is gaining support every day. There is another reason why sex-education will be permanent.
In fact, the tardy recognition of the moral aim of sex-education makes it seem probable that very little interest would have been aroused in the movement if it had been organized on purely ethical grounds and without any reference to the sanitary problems of social diseases.
So far as the problems of sex-education are concerned, there is nothing to be gained by an extensive review of commercialized prostitution. It is generally accepted that the social evil or prostitution is increased by the common ignorance of young people of both sexes regarding the physical and social relations of sex.
The rapid increase of interest in sex-education has been the result of widespread dissemination of convincing facts concerning some common disharmonies that grow out of the sexual problems of the human race. These facts which have led to sex-education should be kept in mind by all who wish to understand or to play a part in the instruction of young people.
It will be most helpful if we consider the problem of selecting teachers with a view to rejecting those who certainly should not undertake the special hygienic and ethical teaching, for teachers who are good in other subjects and who are fortunately free from certain disqualifications discussed in the following, may by means of study adapt themselves for the final and most important stages of sex-education.
We may safely leave mathematics and writing and even reading to schools, but sex-education will fail unless the schools can get the coöperation of the homes, the churches, the Y.M.C.A., the Y.W.C.A., the W.C.T.U., the Boy Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and other organizations which aim to reach young people socially, religiously, and ethically.
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