The boy and girl, now young man and young woman, must both learn that prostitution is a social sin:[39] the “scarlet woman” has been truly called the eternal priestess bearing the sins of humanity.  This is a vast theme; we have got beyond the realm of mere sex education;—­but truth is one, and life is one, and neither logic nor humanity will consent to our stopping short of the whole truth.  Social intelligence—­the illumination of man’s life with man—­the scientific and spiritual comprehension of the apostolic dictum, “We are all members one of another”—­and “if one member suffer, all members suffer with it”—­these are the great arrears of education.  But there never was a time when the spirit of man moved so rapidly forward as here and now, and the movement for sex education is but one striking phase of the great advance.

FOOTNOTES: 

[30] An examination of tables of contents and indexes of standard school texts in nature study and biology will reveal the almost universal absence of all ideas relating to sex and reproduction.  There are two or three recent exceptions.

[31] G. Stanley Hall, Educational Problems, vol.  I, pp. 388-97, Thomson and Geddes, Problems of Sex, pp. 5-17.

[32] Thomson and Geddes, op. cit., pp. 46-52; Saleeby, Parenthood and Race Culture; Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage; Hall, Educational Problems, vol.  I, pp. 424-43.

[33] Fisher, National Vitality; Hall, Youth, chaps.  II, V, VI, XII.

[34] “What makes a Magazine?” Twentieth Century Magazine, September, 1912, pp. 11-20; The Exploitation of Pleasure. Russell Sage Foundation.

[35] See Mrs. Woodallen Chapman, The Moral Problem of the Children, esp. pp. 61-93.  Also the chapter in this book on the education of children.

[36] An epoch-marking book in this field is Miss Torelle’s Plant and Animal Children and How They Grow. (Heath.) See also pamphlet, The Origin of Life, by R.E.  Blount. (Scott, Foresman & Co.)

[37] “The Teaching of Sex in Schools and Colleges,” Social Diseases, October, 1911.  Addresses by G. Stanley Hall, Maurice A. Bigelow, Josiah Strong, Charles W. Eliot, and Mary Putnam Blount, Sexual Reproduction in Animals:  the Purpose and Methods of teaching it. Proceedings N.E.A., 1912, pp. 1324-27.

[38] Hall, G.S., Adolescence, vol.  I, pp. 459-62.

[39] Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil.

CHAPTER VIII

TEACHING PHASES:  FOR CHILDREN

By William Greenleaf Eliot, Jr.