Yet playgrounds and recreation centers are not free from social dangers.  Many of the moral dangers of commercial amusements may arise in municipally owned and managed systems of recreation.  In fact public playgrounds have become such moral menaces as to warrant their closure in the interests of public welfare.  Some of the worst cases of sexual immorality coming to the juvenile courts arise in public playgrounds.  This is the result of bringing large numbers of young people into a common play place without the most careful supervision, guidance, and direction.  The physical growth and health, the morals, the happiness, and the ideals of citizenship of great masses of the people are so deeply involved in the right use of the leisure time of the people that to conduct their activities in any way but according to the highest standards is a civic crime.

CHAPTER VII

EDUCATIONAL PHASES

By Edward Octavius Sisson

The education of youth as it exists has a great gap wherever the subjects of reproduction and sex are concerned.  Children are taught at home many things about every other part of their lives, but usually nothing about this; at school they learn the anatomy and physiology of bones and muscles, of sense-organs, and nervous system, of glands and alimentary canal, of respiration and circulation; but a sudden silence falls just before sex is reached.  We study everything about life except its origin, and in ignoring that we lose a most fascinating and beautiful field of inquiry, an essential part of knowledge, and a vital element in moral intelligence.[30]

The aims of sex education may be stated in the main as follows:—­

(1) The first aim is individual prudence.  Every normal human being must undergo crucial tests and solve vital problems in his own sex life.  The most beautiful successes of life and its most conspicuous failures are both exceedingly frequent in the realm of sex.  The conditions of the sexual life are sufficiently alike in all normal cases so that the experience of the race is valuable to the individual in meeting his own problems.  Each child as he passes onward through youth to maturity is treading a road new to him, not lacking in danger and pitfalls, nor without opportunities for great reward.  Education must give him all the available advance information concerning the road he is to travel.

(2) The second aim is general intelligence.  Sex is a universal element in all living beings, with the exception of the very lowest; it pervades the life of the spirit as well as the life of the body.  No man, therefore, can be intelligent concerning things in general without a clear, definite and accurate knowledge of the fundamental facts of sex.  One of the strongest new visions concerning sex is the marvelous way in it ramifies into all fields of thought and action.  Not a few of the most eminent workers