The mother who establishes a relationship of confidence with her child during these first years will probably, if she possesses any measure of wisdom and tact, be able to preserve it even after the epoch of puberty into the difficult years of adolescence.  But as an educator in the narrower sense her functions will, in most cases, end at or before puberty.  A somewhat more technical and completely impersonal acquaintance with the essential facts of sex then becomes desirable, and this would usually be supplied by the school.

The great though capricious educator, Basedow, to some extent a pupil of Rousseau, was an early pioneer in both the theory and the practice of giving school children instruction in the facts of the sexual life, from the age of ten onwards.  He insists much on this subject in his great treatise, the Elementarwerk (1770-1774).  The questions of children are to be answered truthfully, he states, and they must be taught never to jest at anything so sacred and serious as the sexual relations.  They are to be shown pictures of childbirth, and the dangers of sexual irregularities are to be clearly expounded to them at the outset.  Boys are to be taken to hospitals to see the results of venereal disease.  Basedow is aware that many parents and teachers will be shocked at his insistence on these things in his books and in his practical pedagogic work, but such people, he declares, ought to be shocked at the Bible (see, e.g., Pinloche, La Reforme de l’Education en Allemagne au dixhuitieme siecle:  Basedow et le Philanthropinisme, pp. 125, 256, 260, 272).  Basedow was too far ahead of his own time, and even of ours, to exert much influence in this matter, and he had few immediate imitators.

Somewhat later than Basedow, a distinguished English physician, Thomas Beddoes, worked on somewhat the same lines, seeking to promote sexual knowledge by lectures and demonstrations.  In his remarkable book, Hygeia, published in 1802 (vol. i, Essay IV) he sets forth the absurdity of the conventional requirement that “discretion and ignorance should lodge in the same bosom,” and deals at length with the question of masturbation and the need of sexual education.  He insists on the great importance of lectures on natural history which, he had found, could be given with perfect propriety to a mixed audience.  His experiences had shown that botany, the amphibia, the hen and her eggs, human anatomy, even disease and sometimes the sight of it, are salutary from this point of view.  He thinks it is a happy thing for a child to gain his first knowledge of sexual difference from anatomical subjects, the dignity of death being a noble prelude to the knowledge of sex and depriving it forever of morbid prurience.  It is scarcely necessary to remark that this method of teaching children the elements of sexual anatomy in the post-mortem room has not found many advocates or followers; it is undesirable, for it