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Updated: June 18, 2025
As another illustration of biology touching ethics, I have recently come to believe that the teaching concerning heredity and eugenics, which should be a standard part of the best sex-instruction, has its greatest value in the ethical appeal, and not in the direct biological application of the laws of heredity which underlie eugenics.
No responsible advocate of sex-instruction claims that teaching children concerning the reproduction of animals and plants does anticipate and prevent sexual temptations; but it is a foundation for practical knowledge of human sex problems. I have elsewhere referred to the effect of such studies on attitude.
Since there are so many people who still need the most elementary knowledge concerning the sexual problems that demand educational attack, it is important that there should be local associations which can manage lectures, publications, conferences, and other means of informing the public as to the gravity of the sexual problems of our times, and as to the part which sex-instruction may play in the attempt at finding a solution.
In short, we now need a propagandism for extending the sex-education movement among the masses of people. For those who have already accepted sex-education, a survey of the facts that created a demand for sex-instruction will give a clearer outlook on the movement.
The teaching of sex-hygiene, either personal or social, looks towards improving personal health and preventing infection and injurious influence on the unborn next generation. Obviously, we need both sex-hygiene and eugenics as part of the larger sex-instruction. Summary of Lectures on Sex Problems We have made a general survey of the problems that offer reasons for sex-instruction.
Cabot attacked the kind of sex-instruction that is limited to sex-hygiene. He has later returned to the attack on many occasions. I shall quote a number of his paragraphs and follow each with a discussion of its contents. "The straight, right action in matters of human affection has nothing to do with hygiene. For hygiene has no words to proclaim as to why you and I should behave ourselves.
Considering, as we have done, the sex problems in their many aspects, we are forced to the conclusion that sex-education will prove adequate only when it combines instruction from the several points of view. It must be much more than the sex-hygiene with which the sex-instruction movement started.
The chief question for discussion in this lecture is that of selecting the teacher of those phases of sex-instruction that are directly related to human life, that is, personal sex-hygiene and sex-ethics.
It is true that before this time there were various local and sporadic attempts at instruction concerning sexual processes, but such teaching was chiefly personal and there was no concerted movement looking towards making sex-instruction an integral part of general education.
It would be a dangerous experiment to introduce sex-instruction into all schools by sudden legislation. There must be specially trained teachers of selected personality and tact.
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