and the anatomy and processes of sex, suitable to the individual. To
achieve "depolarisation," there is nothing more efficacious than the
frankness and explicitness of scientific statement, however
elementary. Later a little knowledge of Botany and Zoology will enable
a parent to sketch briefly the outlines of fertilisation and
reproduction. The child may grasp the conception that the life of all
individual plants and animals is directed towards the single aim of
continuing the species. He can be told how the bee carries the male
pollen to the female flower, how all living things habitually
conjugate, the lowest in the scale of development as well as the
highest, and how the fertilised egg becomes the embryo which is
hatched by the mother or born of her. As the child grows older and
understands more and more of these natural processes an opportunity
can be used to make the presentation of the subject more personal. He
can be told that during childhood his own sexual processes have been
undeveloped, but that as he grows older they will awake. That with
their awakening in adolescence new temptations to self-indulgence in
thought or action may assail him, but that these temptations are
delayed by the wisdom of Nature until his understanding has grown and
his man's strength of character has developed. A high ideal of purity
should be set before boy and girl alike, and the conception of sex
from the beginning should be associated in their minds with the high
purpose to which some day it may be put. Before the boy goes to a
boarding-school he should have imbibed from his father the desire for
moral cleanliness, the knowledge of good and of evil, and a cordial
dislike for everything that is sensual, self-indulgent, or nasty.
Talks on such subjects should be very infrequent, but I believe that,
if "depolarisation" is to be achieved, they must be repeated every now
and then during later childhood and in adolescence. To attempt to
impart all this interesting information in a single constrained and
awkward interview is to court failure, or at least to run the risk
that the explanation is not fully understood, so that the child is
mystified, or even offended in his sense of propriety.
I have dwelt at some length upon this question of sex education,
because it is one of especial difficulty when we have to deal with a
child of nervous inheritance, or with a child in whom symptoms of
neurosis have developed in a faulty home environment. Misconduct in
sexual matters is a sign of deficient nervous and moral control, and
when the conduct in other respects is ill-regulated, the development
of sexual processes must be watched with some anxiety. There are those
who see a still more intimate relationship between errors of conduct
or symptoms of neurosis in childhood and the sexual instincts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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