_Frau Bergmann._ O—O God protect me! I deserve—— Go get dressed, child, go get dressed.
_Wendla._ I’ll go. And suppose your child went out and asked the chimney sweep?
A tragedy of childhood—_The Awakening of Spring_, by Frank Wedekind—How we have ignored the need of the young for sexual enlightenment—The old method of silence a fatal mistake—Our fear of sex—The question of the sexual education of the child—Conflicting opinion—The twin causes of our civilisation prudery and prurience—The manner in which parents shirk and evade the natural inquiries of their children about birth and the facts of sex—The inevitable harm of this action—The early activity of the child’s intelligence—Foolish stories and lies—Stimulate instead of quiet curiosity—Sex knowledge gained from servants and vicious companions—This danger from servants greater in the case of boys—Many young boys seduced by women—The duty of the mother to instruct her children—The difficulties that hinder parents—The child and the sexual impulse—The teaching of Freud—The danger from mistakes in the early training of the child—No age too young for education to begin—Mistakes that may be made—Our unconscious teaching stronger than anything we say—The mistake of set lessons—Sex not a subject to be taught like arithmetic—What is necessary is to tell the child the truth—Its questions must be answered as soon as they are put—The importance of not arousing curiosity—The child, not the mother, to be the guide—Cases in which we must be prepared to fail—The mother cannot always help her child—Recapitulation—The real difficulty in sexual education arises from our treatment of sex as something apart from the rest of life—We are afraid—Nothing worth doing can be done until this is changed.
“The child at its mother’s knee is not too young to hear from her lips the sacred facts concerning his own origin; in a few years, indeed, he will be too old, for he will have learnt those facts from a worse source, perhaps in the gutter; and instead of being beautiful to him, as they might and could be, they will be merely dirty.”—HAVELOCK ELLIS.
The quotation I have placed before these three chapters on Sexual Education, which form the fifth and final section of my book, is taken from the play, _The Awakening of Spring_, by Frank Wedekind; he calls it a tragedy of childhood, and dedicates the work to parents and to teachers. The play deals with a group of school children, just entering the age of puberty, and consists mainly of their conversations one with another. These imaginative young souls speculate about the mysteries of birth and sex in a manner that is typical of all children, not mentally inert. Herein rests the great value of the work: we come to realise the terrible darkness surrounding the sexual life of the great majority of boys and girls, with the resulting tragedies that may, and often do, destroy health and even life. Unable to explain the forces germinating in their nature, these children are hindered and crushed by the sham decencies and complacent morality that greet their blind gropings. Never was a more powerful indictment made against the sham of our educational system as a preparation for life.