order to get its general bearings and
will teach the sex aspect of literature on a basis of high ideals of
life and love, we need have no fear as to the culmination of the
instruction which properly begins with study of the biological facts of
life in its sexual aspects and leads on and on to its climax in the
ethical aspects of the individual's sex life in relation to other
individuals, that is, to society.

[Sidenote: Not to be labeled "sex-education."]

I take it for granted that no teacher of literature who contributes to
sex-instruction will let the students know that the emphasis placed on
great life problems is part of a conspiracy of parents and educators to
give in the name of sex-education instruction that will help prepare
the individual for facing the problems. Here, as elsewhere, the young
people had better be left unaware that their elders are so interested
in giving them instruction regarding sex problems that they have
organized, for study of ways and means, a movement known as
sex-education.

[Sidenote: Sex tragedies of fiction.]

The abundant literature that points to the moral to be drawn from
sexual tragedies has doubtless influenced thousands of young people. I
have talked with many educated people who confessed to having been
profoundly influenced by such books as Eliot's "Adam Bede," Hawthorne's
"Scarlet Letter," Goethe's "Faust," Hardy's "Tess of the
d'Urbervilles." One might go on and compile an extensive bibliography,
for fiction of all languages of all times is full of the errors into
which insistent sex instincts have drawn men and women who were not
masters of themselves. All standard fiction in which sexual errors and
their penalties are associated may do good as a part of the larger
sex-education, but the teacher should make sure that the young readers
arrive at the correct interpretation.

[Sidenote: Fiction without a moral.]

Against that type of fiction which presents sex problems that do not
clearly "point a moral," the average so-called "problem novel" of
recent time, there should be general opposition by workers for the
larger sex-education. Many of the modern novels and magazine stories
seem to introduce sexual situations for the same reason that Boccaccio
did in some of his tales, namely, the attractiveness of lasciviousness.
Unlike the commendable novels, it is characteristic of the equivocal
ones that no penalty is demanded or paid and no moral conclusion is
suggested. In