child’s entrance upon school-life is his first plunge into the great world beyond the family circle, his first serious contact with new thoughts, customs, and standards--with a new code of morality; not the formal morality of his professors, but the confused practical morality of his school companions. Here he may meet with every kind of evil, of which he had previously no conception, carried on in a crude, practical form by those whom he naturally looks up to--his elder companions, who are perhaps rich and clever, and whom he regards as ‘men.’ How is the child strengthened to meet this grand new life, as it seems to him, which entrances him with its novelty, its variety, and its vigour, and which very often produces a feeling of kindly contempt for the narrow home life? Full confidence between parent and child is necessary in order that all the child is learning may be known. This school world, unlike the larger world, is directly under the possibility of parental control. What parents, as a body, require, the teacher will endeavour to provide. The material arrangements and regulations, as well as the moral tone of any school to which a child is sent, must be considered. It being remembered that the great vices of self-abuse and fornication are the curse of our schools and colleges, all the direct and indirect means must be sought for by which these vices can be as rigidly excluded from our educational establishments as the vice of thieving. School and college sentiment should be trained to regard them as equally dishonourable and unmanly. They must be overcome chiefly by moral means in connection with hygienic arrangements. The views of the principal on the subject of sexual training, the character of assistant-teachers, the water-closet and sleeping arrangements, the amount of outdoor exercise secured, should all be studied by the conscientious parent. Some direct hygienic instruction and warning, suited to the age of the child, should be given. It is a false and cruel delicacy which ignores the great danger of schools, and sends an innocent child utterly unprepared into a school society where corruption exists. ‘I believe,’ writes an experienced teacher of lads, ‘that ninety-nine hundredths of the immorality that prevails amongst young men originates primarily in ignorance and perverted curiosity.’ He therefore lays down the following practical rules for the hygienic instruction which he deems indispensable: First, that the physiology of sex should be carefully subordinated to general physiology and hygiene, and that it should always be treated comparatively. Secondly, that all instruction and examination should be oral and in class, no text-books being given to the pupils, the utmost simplicity and plainness of speech being employed, and only outline diagrams used as pictorial illustrations.[42]