intended to develop a sense of
individual responsibility for the transmission of one's good or bad
inherited qualities to offspring. The teaching of sex-hygiene, either
personal or social, looks towards improving personal health and
preventing infection and injurious influence on the unborn next
generation. Obviously, we need both sex-hygiene and eugenics as part of
the larger sex-instruction.
Sec. 14. _Summary of Lectures on Sex Problems_
[Sidenote: Problems of health, attitude, and morals.]
We have made a general survey of the problems that offer reasons for
sex-instruction. We have noted that some of the problems are concerned
with health and, hence, lie within the scope of sex-hygiene in the
strict sense of that term; but some of them have only the remotest
relation to health and hygiene. On the contrary, they relate to the
ethical, social, and aesthetic attitude of individuals towards sex and
reproduction. Obviously, these touch problems not of sex health, but of
sex morality. In their educational importance I believe them as great,
perhaps even greater, than those of sex-hygiene. In fact, I have come
to believe that many individuals can best solve all their own sexual
problems on the basis of moral and aesthetic attitude.
[Sidenote: Many-sided instruction needed.]
Considering, as we have done, the sex problems in their many aspects,
we are forced to the conclusion that sex-education will prove adequate
only when it combines instruction from the several points of view. It
must be much more than the sex-hygiene with which the sex-instruction
movement started. We need sexual knowledge that will conserve health,
that will develop social and ethical and eugenic responsibility for
sexual actions, that will lead to increased happiness as well as to
improved health, and that will give a nobler and purer view of life's
possibilities. In all these lines in which sex influences human life
profoundly, sex-education holds out the hope of help towards a better
life for all who receive and apply its lessons.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In the _American Journal of Public Health_ for July, 1913, Dr.
John S. Fulton, Director General of the XV International Congress on
Hygiene and Demography, criticized severely the extremely radical
statistics that were presented on charts at the sex-hygiene exhibit of
the Congress, and were later published in Wilson's "Education of the
Young in Sex-hygiene."
[2] There is danger in quoting
|