d
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._

My children when they were little were fascinated with a book which their
mother used to read to them, called _Mother Nature and Her Helpers._ Each
chapter or lesson was made up of interesting information and ideas
suggested by the pictures. At the head of the first chapter was a picture
of a mother sitting by a cradle with every surrounding and circumstance of
humble, happy home life. Succeeding chapters were upon the cradle and the
home of plants and animals. Ovaries of plants and nests of birds and
squirrels were all set forth in terms of the child's experience of home
life, home-building, home-protecting, and feeding the baby. Doubtless the
design of the author was to lead the child to an understanding and
appreciation of its own home life and love by showing it home life in its
origins and elements. But an equally important implication lay in the
fact that the child was brought into its intimacy with plant and animal
life along the angle of its own human experience and of its own home
ideals. After such an introduction to the homes of plants and animals,
whenever it should seem best to apprise the child of the details of plant
and animal reproduction, the additional facts would instantly find their
places in close relation to facts already familiar and already related to
his highest childish affections and ideals.

For the basis of sexual instruction for a child should be the difference,
not the similarity between man and animals. If the basis is made the
similarity between man and animals, the child, as time goes on and as its
own sexual life increasingly awakens, may tend to imitate animals, may
attempt to justify the natural and unrestrained promiscuousness of its own
instincts, may justify unrestrained sexual life in the name of nature as
against the alleged artificialities of c