A Treatise on Parents and Children

The suppression of economic knowledge, disastrous as it is, is quite / intelligible, its corrupt motive being as clear as the motive of a / burglar for concealing his jemmy from a policeman. But the other great / suppression in our schools, the suppression of the subject of sex, is a / case of taboo. In mankind, the lower the type, and the less cultivated / the mind, the less courage there is to face important subjects / objectively. The ablest and most highly cultivated people continually / discuss religion, politics, and sex: it is hardly an exaggeration to say / that they discuss nothing else with fully-awakened interest. Commoner / and less cultivated people, even when they form societies for / discussion, make a rule that politics and religion are not to be / mentioned, and take it for granted that no decent person would attempt / to discuss sex. The three subjects are feared because they rouse the / crude passions which call for furious gratification in murder and rapine / at worst, and, at best, lead to quarrels and undesirable states of / consciousness.

Even when this excuse of bad manners, ill temper, and brutishness (for / that is what it comes to) compels us to accept it from those adults / among whom political and theological discussion does as a matter of fact / lead to the drawing of knives and pistols, and sex discussion leads to / obscenity, it has no application to children except as an imperative / reason for training them to respect other people's opinions, and to / insist on respect for their own in these as in other important matters / which are equally dangerous: for example, money. And in any case / there are decisive reasons; superior, like the reasons for / suspending conventional reticences between doctor and patient, to all / considerations of mere decorum, for giving proper instruction in the / facts of sex. Those who object to it (not counting coarse people who / thoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading a / fictitious delicacy) are, in effect, advocating ignorance as a safeguard / against precocity. If ignorance were practicable there would be / something to be said for it up to the age at which ignorance is a danger / instead of a safeguard. Even as it is, it seems undesirable that any / special emphasis should be given to the subject, whether by way of / delicacy and poetry or too impressive warning. But the plain fact is / that in refusing to allow the child to be taught by qualified unrelated / elders (the parents shrink from the lesson, even when they are otherwise / qualified, because their own relation to the child makes the subject / impossible between them) we are virtually arranging to have our children / taught by other children in guilty secrets and unclean jests. And that / settles the question for all sensible people.