V. EDUCATION FOR LIFE

In Our Schools.—The conventional taboo upon all matters connected with sex is nowhere more strikingly illustrated, than in the vast dumbness upon the subject in our ordinary system of education. Great strides have been made in some subjects taught; methods and matter taught concerning the physical universe, ancient and later times, languages, and mathematics, have improved amazingly in recent years. But, after all, our happiness or unhappiness in life depends more upon our sex life than upon all of these subjects put together. What do our schools teach upon this vital subject? To answer concisely and succinctly, Nothing.

There is often a course in personal hygiene; but this avoids all matters connected with sex. Human physiology is taught only descriptively: that is, the child is taught to distinguish between his cerebellum and his small toe. But the important generative organs, their normal functions, their use and abuse, is left an immense gap in our pedagogic systems. This is based upon ideas which any educator will at once denounce: namely, that the body is vile, that it is nasty, that it is shameful, that it is wrong to talk about it, that it will stimulate undesirable conduct to have scientific information imparted about it. Meanwhile, we have the conduct without the stimulus. Yet the very educators who see that these root-ideas of the taboo are wrong, hem and haw when it comes to advocating proper sexual education.

Surreptitiously the matter is being partially remedied by subjects known vaguely as nature study: especially botany, zoology, and physiology. Here we have the proper introduction to the study of human sexual organs and their development. The world of botany, with its flowers and trees constantly around us, does not provoke our sense of shame; the promiscuity of a pine tree, with its manifold wind-scattered pollen, does not shock even a ladies’ club. The strange development of sex in the plant kingdom is a good start for the subject. Below the comparatively simple fertilization of the flowering plants, we have the lower forms, with their queer complicated matings. Ferns and club mosses, to take objects easily observable, contain many a lesson, with their sex-producing thallic stage, and the tiny male fertilizer wiggling itself upward toward the female ovum in a drop of water. Among the flowering plants, the elaborate devices of nature to secure cross fertilization, by flower arrangement and adaptations to insects, are amazing and thought-provoking. The presence of hermaphroditic flowers will loosen something of the rooted taboo idea that so-called sexual perversions are innately shameful things. The development of the young from the fertilizated ovum to the production of the seed and of the plant gives a symbolic picture to the learning mind of what he is to expect in the human world.

Zoology offers the next step; and here the sense of shame comes in. There is ordinarily held to be something shameful in observing a cock treading a hen, or any sexual act among animals. Yet the slow hatching of the eggs by a hen is not regarded as shameful; and the pet cat’s production of a litter of kittens, or the dog’s bringing forth puppies, or the cow’s calving, are simple steps that lead the way directly toward an understanding of human sexual nature. The sense of shame connected with seeing the mating of chickens or animals is a thing which may with benefit be lost; it is no more unclean than the opening of a flower, or the sight of a rainbow after a storm. From zoology may be gathered a direct sense of sexual functions, organs, and their products; the second main step in the school of education of the young.

The third step will be a study of human physiology, including the generative organs. These will not be emphasized; and the initial tendency to giggle at this part of the subject will disappear in the cool detachment of the teacher’s presentation. If thought best, this subject may be taught independently to boys and girls. The teaching should be comprehensive both as to the organs and their use and abuse.

In the Home.—Pending a wholesale adoption of this in our schools, and even after such adoption, these subjects should be taught to the growing child, as soon as he manifests curiosity about them, in the home. The normal child asks quite early, “Where did I come from?” The conventional answer about the stork or the rosebush is soon enough corrected, by the child’s reading or his companions; the result of parental deception will be to shake the child’s faith in his parents. The simple truth is best: just as the flower holds its little egg, which the bee quickens to life by bringing a gift from the father flower; just as the mother hen has her egg, fertilized, in her body, and brings it forth, sets on it, and produces her young; just as the mother cat carries her egg, duly fertilized, in her body, and brings out the kittens; just so the mother carried baby in a little egg just under her heart, and at the proper time brought her out. It need not all be taught at once; but without evasion the story ought to be filled in.

This will call first, of course, for education of the parents. You who are a parent or a prospective parent, make it your business to acquaint yourself thoroughly with the whole history and evolution of sex and its practices; all knowledge gained will aid you in directing your own life, as well as holding a torch to those who come after you.

As the child approaches and undergoes adolescence, it is even more necessary that, preferably both parents, and certainly the one of his own sex, should deal fully, frankly, and without shame, with all the details of the child’s sexual development. Knowledge is the surest protection the child can have. The duty of the wise teacher is to enlighten his pupils thoroughly about the possible ways before him, and what good or ill will be gained by following each. With this information thoroughly comprehended, the child may be depended upon, in the majority of cases, to decide far more correctly and helpfully problems connected with the sexual urge, than the child who grows up in darkness, as far as his parents are concerned, and receives his information from doubtful sources, with the slime of the nasty mind upon the clean theme.

Education in Love.—Yet all of this is too elementary, to be enough for the adolescent, and for the young man and woman. For love is more than a matter of human psychology and its functioning: love is an art. There must be education, ultimately, in the art of love. Savage races usually have such education; the great initiation ceremonies and dances, at the time of puberty of the young men and women, are merely the culmination of an education in love-making that is given frankly and openly to all in the tribe.

The average man or woman, barring such stray and often fouled hints as he receives from friends and companions no wiser than he in the subject, enters upon mating or the marriage state with no understanding of what he is called upon to do. In the usual marriage today, the girl is presumptively at least virginal, and the young man is not. He has had his contact, perhaps, with prostitutes, who have mastered the technique of stimulating passion in the man and of suppressing it in themselves, until they desire to release it in themselves. He has no understanding of the needs of the virginal nature before him. Frequently he is profoundly disappointed in the fact that his shy and embarrassed young wife, who looks to him for the enlightenment he cannot give, does not stimulate him as the prostitute did. The prostitute regarded him as a matter of business, and did not call upon him to put forth his best efforts to see that she was physiologically satisfied. The wife’s ideas are a vague blank upon this subject; but her physiological need is there.

This poem is a concentrated statement of the usual outstanding differences:

The life lit at the end is her own life, as well as the generated child’s. In other words, there is a profound physiological difference in man and woman, in the practice of love. The average man comes to his passion quickly; and, after his orgasm, it dies as quickly. The average woman mounts far more slowly toward the crest of her passion; and long after the man’s normal passion is gone, she is desirous. Maidenly shame will make her incapable of explaining this, even if she understands it. The duty is on the man to understand the delicate human instrument, and to see that the chords are not jangled.

For love, it must be repeated, is an art. It should never be a hurried routine on the man’s part, which leaves the woman unsatisfied; least of all, should it be a hastened satisfaction of his own desire, upon an inexperienced woman, who may thereby suffer a shock that renders her frigid for life. Medical records contain case after case where the experiences of the nuptial night have wrecked the whole subsequent content of the woman, or, indeed, her reason itself. Young wives who commit suicide on the honeymoon are often impelled by the man’s initial and sometimes unconscious brutality. Love is an art, calling for infinite tact and understanding on the part of the man, as well as the woman. Both lovers may go into it timidly at first; there will come soon enough, if love develops normally, when it will be splendid and wholesome and naked and unashamed. In the matured love, there is all consideration for the wellbeing of the beloved one, and a complete giving on both parts, with no withholding.

It will require an immense change in popular conceptions before any wholesale education in the art of love can be given in this country, indispensable though it may be to a right living and a happy loving. But the wise individual will educate himself, by extensive reading of literature upon the subject, and by personal contact with those in position to know. It is Utopian to expect such education now; the general history of Utopian ideas, however, has been that they were proposed, cried down and persecuted, and ultimately adopted.