Of course, only the ultra-Utopian dreamer claims that sex-education can solve all the sexual problems of civilized life, but even the most pessimistic disbeliever in the new movement admits that knowledge of sexual life will be helpful to the great majority of people. Hence, it is worth while to organize the educational attack on the sex problems which we have considered in the preceding lectures. It seems to me that we may gain an advantage by frankly admitting that the educational attack is not expected to solve all sex problems for all people, for by such admission we put to flight those shallow cynics who have opposed the sex-education movement because they think (and probably correctly) that immorality and social diseases and all other sexual disharmonies will continue to exist as long as the human species does. Likewise, there will be dishonesty and murder and preventable diseases and all other human troubles in spite of education; but the advancement of learning has slowly and progressively reduced the sum total of all the disharmonies of life until now civilized people are largely free from many of the original or barbaric conditions. Along similar lines we may confidently think of sex-education as making a constantly advancing and victorious attack on the problems of life that have grown out of our primitive sexual instincts. Sex-education, like all other education, strives towards ideals that individuals and society may always approach but may never reach. It is only another case of Emerson's advice, "hitch your wagon to a star," which means the adoption of high ideals that lead ever on and on towards better life. With this understanding that _the task of sex-education is the ever-advancing improvement of sexual conditions in individual as well as in social life_, let us turn now to consider the possible lines for definite educational attack on the chief problems of sex. It will be most helpful if we first analyze the general task of sex-education into some specific aims that may definitely guide instruction, and then in later lectures consider the methods and detailed subject matter of sex-instruction. Sec. 16. _The Aims of Sex-education_ [Sidenote: Emphasis on social disease.] Since the revelations concerning the disastrous physical effects of sexual immorality, especially as it exists in the commercialized conditions of the social evil, have had the chief influence in awakening intelligent people from their age-long ignorance and indifference concerning the great sex problems, it was natural that those who first proposed special instruction should have emphasized the social evil and its diseases so much as to create the widespread but erroneous impression that the great aim of sex-education is to teach the distressing facts concerning the pathological consequences of immorality. [Sidenote: Other problems need emphasis.]