p of members of the National Education
Association considered briefly the importance of instructing young
people. However, this meeting was of ephemeral significance and had no
genetic relation to the present-day movement. Other early interest in
sex-instruction is indicated in Professor Earl Barnes's bibliography
which was published in his "Studies in Education," Vol. I, p. 301,
1897.

The educational activities, especially the publications of the American
Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, soon attracted the serious
attention of numerous physicians, ministers, and educators in various
parts of the United States; and about twenty other societies for study
and improvement of the sex problems were organized within a few years
after the original society.

[Sidenote: Original aim for sanitary ends.]

The sex-education movement both in Europe and America had its origin as
an attempt to check the spread of the venereal or social diseases. The
idea that education should work for sexual morality for its own sake
and not simply for protection against venereal diseases has only
recently begun to appear in the literature of sex-education, and so far
it seems to have made only a limited impression on many of those who
have been active in the prophylactic campaign against social disease.
In fact, the tardy recognition of the moral aim of sex-education makes
it seem probable that very little interest would have been aroused in
the movement if it had been organized on purely ethical grounds and
without any reference to the sanitary problems of social diseases. To
one who looks at sexual morality as a question of right conduct which
brings its own rewards, it is a shock to find so many thinking people
who accept calmly the traditional views of the relation of the sexes
and seem to take no interest in the immorality of men except as it is
likely to lead to venereal disease or to illegitimacy which demands
forced marriage or monetary payments. The truth is that the civilized
world at large is very far from a working code of sexual morals which
will be practiced because of promised rewards rather than because of
probable punishments. It is natural, then, that the sex-education
movement should have started with a proclamation of physical
punishments for immorality rather than an offer of ethical and
psychical rewards for morality.

[Sidenote: Both sanitary and moral.]

However, the fact that sex-education, under the name of