Going to school is rightly considered an epoch in the child’s life.  No longer confined to the narrow circle of home and family friends, the child may lose all the tiny beginnings of desired virtues in this larger life.  Or, on the contrary, when the school recognizes and continues home training, or supplies what has not been given, these foundation virtues may be so applied to the old problems in new places as to form a foundation for the life conduct of the girl and the woman that is to be.

Take the question of sex knowledge, so widely agitated of late.  We cannot guard our girls against contact with some who will exert a harmful influence.  We can only forearm them by natural, gradual information on this subject as their young minds reach out for knowledge, so that sex knowledge comes, as other knowledge comes, without solemnity or sentimentality on the one hand or undue mystery and a hint of shame on the other.  No course in sex hygiene can take the place of this early gradual teaching, answering each question as it comes, in a perfectly natural way, and with due regard for the child’s wonder at all of nature’s marvelous processes.  The little girl who knows presents no possibilities to the perverted mind which seeks to astonish and excite her.  And if she knows because “my mother told me,” the guard is as nearly perfect as can be devised.

Upon this foundation the formal course in sex hygiene may be built.  Such a course will then be a scientific summing up, with application to personal ideals and requirements.  It can easily, safely, and wisely be deferred until the adolescent period.

Teachers and mothers can find scarcely any field more worthy of their thoughtful concentration than the cultivation of good temper in the girls under their care.  The number of marriages rendered failures, the number of homes totally wrecked, by sulking or nagging or outbursts of ill-temper, can probably not be estimated.  Neither can we count the number of innocent people in homes not apparently wrecked whose lives are rendered more or less unhappy by association with the woman of uncertain temper.  Think of the families in which some undesirable trait of this sort seems to pass from generation to generation, accepted by each member calmly as an inheritance not to be thrown off.  “It’s my disposition,” one will tell you with a sigh.  “Mother was just the same.”  Surely the time to combat these undesirable traits is in childhood, and probably the first step is for the mother, who looks back to her mother as “being just the same,” to stop talking or thinking about inherited traits and at least to present an outward show of good temper for the child to see.

Then there is the teacher, who is under a strain and who finds annoyances in every hour which tend to destroy her equanimity.  Her serenity, if she can accomplish it, will prove an excellent example.  And little by little the mother and the teacher who have accomplished self-control for themselves may teach self-control and the beauties of good temper to the little girls who live in the atmosphere they create.