or more delicate task lies before teacher and mother than the
guidance of the girl in her choice.

[Illustration: Photograph by Brown Bros.
A school playground. The school and the playground form the growing
girl's community life]

[Illustration: Photograph by Brown Bros.
A model playground. The model playgrounds in the parks are doing much
to aid the playground movement]

Going to school is rightly considered an epoch in the child's life. No
longer confined to the narrow circle of home and family friends, the
child may lose all the tiny beginnings of desired virtues in this
larger life. Or, on the contrary, when the school recognizes and
continues home training, or supplies what has not been given, these
foundation virtues may be so applied to the old problems in new places
as to form a foundation for the life conduct of the girl and the woman
that is to be.

Take the question of sex knowledge, so widely agitated of late. We
cannot guard our girls against contact with some who will exert a
harmful influence. We can only forearm them by natural, gradual
information on this subject as their young minds reach out for
knowledge, so that sex knowledge comes, as other knowledge comes,
without solemnity or sentimentality on the one hand or undue mystery
and a hint of shame on the other. No course in sex hygiene can take
the place of this early gradual teaching, answering each question as
it comes, in a perfectly natural way, and with due regard for the
child's wonder at all of nature's marvelous processes. The little girl
_who knows_ presents no possibilities to the perverted mind which
seeks to astonish and excite her. And if she knows because "my mother
told me," the guard is as nearly perfect as can be devised.

Upon this foundation the formal course in sex hygiene may be built.
Such a course will then be a scientific summing up, with application
to personal ideals and requirements. It can easily, safely, and wisely
be deferred until the adolescent period.

Teachers and mothers can find scarcely any field more worthy of their
thoughtful concentration than the cultivation of good temper in the
girls under their care. The number of marriages rendered failures, the
number of homes totally wrecked, by sulking or nagging or outbursts
of ill-temper, can probably not be estimated. Neither can we count the
number of innocent people in homes not apparently wrecked whose lives
are rendered more or less unhappy by association