WISE GUIDANCE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 153, 2 December 1938, Page 7

WISE GUIDANCE

SEX EDUCATION

The need for sex education in childhood, not merely for adequate information, but for the development of a proper emotional attitude towards the whole subject, was stressed by Mr. *A. S. Campbell, M.A., in an address to the Wellington Sex Hygiene and Birth Regulation Society. Sex had been treated traditionally as something to be ashamed of, he said, and it had been assumed that the young should know nothing of it until they had grown up. This was partly the result of the erroneous view that the pre-adolescent years were, except in rare cases, completely sexless and that normal, healthy children did not have sexual interests of any kind.

The result was that children frequently got information for themselves, and often very distorted information; and many grew up with all kinds of misunderstandings, morbid fears, and furtive and unhealthy attitudes which made a sensible and dignified attitude towards sex impossible. The foundation of sex education should be laid in the home, Mr. Campbell said, and sex teaching should not be considered apart from the general conditions in the family which favoured healthy emotional development. The indirect influence of a home in which the atmosphere was happy and harmonious, and in which the parents themselves were properly adjusted to each other, was more powerful than any special teaching could be. It was. however, vital that informaton should be given freely and as soon as the child asked questions, if not before. While it was unwise to rush in prematurely with information the child could not grasp, most child psychologists declared that it was preferable to give the information too soon than too late.

In dealing with sex education in schools, Mr. Campbell referred first to the question of co-educatiori. There was general agreement that co-educa-tion was a sound policy in childhood, but some educationists, especially in England, had doubts about its desirability during adolescence. But the claim made by Badley and others who could speak from long experience— the claim that adolescent boys and girls who have been brought up together have gained a more soundly based and healthier attitude towards the other sex than those who have been separated—seemed to be fully justified. The fear that co-education made boys effeminate and girls hoydenish was simply not borne out by experience and those who argued that co-education increased the difficulties of adolescence by a prematurely awakening of sex feeling often appeared to assume that so long as the sexes were segregated sex feeling lay dormant, an assumption which was plainly untrue.

The speaker considered that special sex teaching in schools should be approached very cautiously, and that mass instruction on the subject could be definitely harmful. Sex education should be brought into the curriculum not as special instruction, but as part of the general education everyone should receive in biology and human physiology.