Stanley Hall, after remarking that sexual education should be chiefly from fathers to sons and from mothers to daughters, adds:  “It may be that in the future this kind of initiation will again become an art, and experts will tell us with more confidence how to do our duty to the manifold exigencies, types and stages of youth, and instead of feeling baffled and defeated, we shall see that this age and theme is the supreme opening for the highest pedagogy to do its best and most transforming work, as well as being the greatest of all opportunities for the teacher of religion” (Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. i, p. 469).  “At Williams College, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Clark,” the same distinguished teacher observes (ib., p. 465), “I have made it a duty in my departmental teaching to speak very briefly, but plainly to young men under my instruction, personally if I deemed it wise, and often, though here only in general terms, before student bodies, and I believe I have nowhere done more good, but it is a painful duty.  It requires tact and some degree of hard and strenuous common sense rather than technical knowledge.”

It is scarcely necessary to say that the ordinary teacher of either sex is quite incompetent to speak of sexual hygiene.  It is a task to which all, or some, teachers must be trained.  A beginning in this direction has been made in Germany by the delivery to teachers of courses of lectures on sexual hygiene in education.  In Prussia the first attempt was made in Breslau when the central school authorities requested Dr. Martin Chotzen to deliver such a course to one hundred and fifty teachers who took the greatest interest in the lectures, which covered the anatomy of the sexual organs, the development of the sexual instinct, its chief perversions, venereal diseases, and the importance of the cultivation of self-control.  In Geschlecht und Gesellschaft (Bd. i, Heft 7) Dr. Fritz Reuther gives the substance of lectures which he has delivered to a class of young teachers; they cover much the same ground as Chotzen’s.

There is no evidence that in England the Minister of Education has yet taken any steps to insure the delivery of lectures on sexual hygiene to the pupils who are about to leave school.  In Prussia, however, the Ministry of Education has taken an active interest in this matter, and such lectures are beginning to be commonly delivered, though attendance at them is not usually obligatory.  Some years ago (in 1900), when it was proposed to deliver a series of lectures on sexual hygiene to the advanced pupils in Berlin schools, under the auspices of a society for the improvement of morals, the municipal authorities withdrew their permission to use the classrooms, on the ground that “such lectures would be extremely dangerous to the moral sense of an audience of the young.”  The same objection has been made by municipal officials in France.  In Germany, at all events,