From a psychological point of view the right policy would be to reduce
the external temptations, above all, the opportunities for contact.
Coeducation, for instance, was morally without difficulties twenty
years ago, but it is unfit in high schools and colleges for the
eastern part of the nation in the atmosphere of to-day. Moreover, the
æsthetic spirit ought to be educated systematically, and above all,
the whole education of the youth ought to be built on discipline; the
lesson by which the youth learns to overcome the desire and to inhibit
the will is the most essential for the young American of to-morrow.
The policy of silence has never meant that a girl should grow up
without the consciousness that the field of sexual facts exists in our
social world; on the contrary, those feelings of shame and decency
which belong to the steady learning of a clean child from the days of
the nursery have strongly impressed on the young soul that such
regions are real, but that they must not be approached by curiosity or
self-seeking wilfulness. This instinct itself brought something of
ideal value, of respect and even of reverence into the most trivial
life, however often it became ruined by foul companionship. To
strengthen this instinctive emotion of mysterious respect, which makes
the young mind shrink from brutal intrusion, will remain the wisest
policy, as long as we cannot change that automatic mechanism of human
nature by which the sexual thought stimulates the sexual organs. The
masses are, of course, in favour of the opposite programme, which is
in itself only another symptom of the erotic atmosphere into which the
new antipuritanic nation has come. That mechanism of the nervous
system furnishes them a pleasant excitement when they read and hear
the discussions and plays which bristle with sexual instruction. The
magazines which, with the best intentions, fight for the new policy,
easily find millions of readers; the plays with their erotic overflow
and the moral ending are crowded, and mostly by those who hardly need
the instruction any longer. A nation which tries to lift its sexual
morality by dragging the sexual problems to the street for the
inspection of the crowd, without shyness and without shame, and which
wilfully makes them objects of gossip and stage entertainment, is
doing worse than Munchausen when he tried to lift himself by his
scalp. It seems less important that the youth learn the secrets of
sexual intercourse than that their teachers and guardians learn the
elements of physiological psychology; the sexual sins of the youth
start from the educational sins of the elders.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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