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Updated: July 29, 2025
A playground or a swimming pool will do more to keep them mentally and morally sound than scores of lectures on sex-hygiene. "The world is wide, and a great deal is happening in it. I do not plead for ignorance, but for the gradual and harmonious broadening of the field of knowledge, and for a more careful consideration of ways and means.
It therefore seems clear that, while studies of reproduction are prominent in sex-education, they should be regarded as introductory to the problems of sex, especially for young people. The Misunderstanding of Sex Some educators have expressed the wish that some one might suggest a satisfactory substitute for the terms "sex-hygiene" and "sex-education," omitting the word "sex."
The second kind of people who should not teach sex-hygiene are the men and women who are the unfortunate victims of sexual abnormality, either physical or psychical, that more or less influences their outlook on life.
In fact, the most impressive sex-hygiene is that relating to social disease, and its value is chiefly in the ethical appeal for protection of innocent wives and children. Most prominent of those who have declared that hygienic and moral teaching should be dissociated is Dr. Richard C. Cabot, of Boston.
Even entire omission of the study of the personal and social aspects of sex-hygiene and sex-ethics is far wiser than intrusting a class to a teacher with one or more of the negative qualifications that we have been considering in this lecture.
Sex-hygiene in its personal and social aspects will make healthier parents able to give their offspring a healthier start in life, especially because the offspring is free from the prenatal effects of disease. The teaching of heredity and eugenics is intended to develop a sense of individual responsibility for the transmission of one's good or bad inherited qualities to offspring.
Now, sex-education as thus defined is more extensive than sex-hygiene, which term was originally applied to instruction concerning sex. Sex-hygiene obviously refers to health as influenced by sexual processes, and as such it is a convenient subdivision of the science of health.
I realize that this statement may be declared heretical by many of the present-day advocates of sex-hygiene, because they have approached this latest educational movement from the standpoint of physical health, and especially because their attention has been drawn to the very common occurrence of pathological conditions.
One infers from all his lectures that he believes it good to teach hygiene for health, ethics for morality, and biology for science; but that these should not be correlated because to him they are unrelated. It seems to me that he has simply been misled by the overenthusiasm of some of the first writers on sex-hygiene and by the widespread use of that limited term instead of sex-education.
The fourth kind of people who ought not to instruct the young in personal problems of sex-hygiene are the men and women whose own unhappy romances or married life, or whose knowledge of vice conditions, have made them pessimistic concerning sex-problems.
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