Reverence for sex as something holy should be part of every child’s education. The eternal hymn of Love is the noblest strain in the universe, and the young should be taught to heed it reverently. There must be no false valuation of the impulse which unites men and women, if we wish our daughters and our sons to fulfil worthily the high duties of parenthood. We cannot teach unless our faith is great and we also practise. We must plant deep in our children’s fresh natures a desire for beauty, not alone in outside things, but in all thought and in every deed relating to the Life force, which is Love. You will see now the scope of the claim I am making for sexual education: it is to be the means whereby concealments are to be broken through and shame in sex is to be destroyed. CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XV SEXUAL EDUCATION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE ADOLESCENT GIRL Our very limited powers—Our children have to experiment and to learn life for themselves—The theoretical teacher who reforms the world on paper—The hindrances placed in the way of the sex emotions—We educate girls and boys as if they were sexless neuters—The folly of this denial of sex—The origin of our fear—An attempt to express the psychological meaning of the combination of the man and the woman—The differences between the boy and the girl—An attempt to follow this dissimilarity—The evils arising from the modern tendency to ignore sex differences—This the real weakness in the position of the modern girl—She has a profound distrust of herself as a woman—Our schools and educational system founded on the needs of boys—This a great evil—The development of the girl at puberty more difficult than the development of the boy—Every girl lives a hidden life of her own—The conflict in the sensitive soul of the adolescent—This the age of romance and idealism—The danger of sudden and wrong knowledge of the physical facts of sex—Full instruction of girls more necessary even than the instruction of boys—The immense danger of repression—The transformation of puberty—Painful experiences of youth act harmfully in the later years—Our deadly silences and sham presentation of life—The injury we do to the girl by ignoring her sexual life—Induces sexual coldness—This the great cause of unhappiness in marriage—Our fear and denial of love—This what is wrong with life. CHAPTER XV SEXUAL EDUCATION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE ADOLESCENT GIRL