SEX INSTRUCTION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 199, 16 April 1943, Page 3

SEX INSTRUCTION

Sir,-I am afraid I did not make it quite clear in criticising M. R. Kent’s article that my hypothetical child was the same as every other child, but that at the time of asking the inevitable question about the origin of babies he was not interested in a physical explanation. As every teacher and mother knows, there is nothing like striking when the iron is hot, While a child’s contemporaries (with whom after all it has to share the most important of its sexual life), will sooner or later correct his ignorance as to physical facts, it is very unlikely that they do so in regard to spiritual ones.. The child in his early life is entirely dependent on his adult relations and. friends for: spiritual, aesthetic, and

ethical truths. The more he has of these, which can hardly be called "airy nonsense," the more he has to fall back on for support against crudely expressed p'-ysical facts. The more sensitive the child (and what child made of human clay is not sensitive?), the more he needs those truths (hardly "pretty makebelieves") that no physical force can destroy. If the percentage of sub-normal adults appears to your correspondent as distressingly low, it appears to be a case of we are all out of step but our Johnny. My contemporaries have not had the advantage of those long periods of peace your correspondent talks of. They fell in love during the world war, married during an inflation period, bore children during a depression, brought up their families during war and rumours of war, and now another world war has seized their chil-

| dren.-

OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE

(Dunedin)