Sex education, September 1939. Susan Isaacs talks about the "silliness" of approaching this through a sickly and sentimental account of pollination and germination in flowers. - it is the wrong way to cope with the doubts and anxieties of youth. This is her lengthiest and one of her strongest replies to a correspondent.

September 1939 In Home and School "Readers Questions" 

Susan Isaacs rejects any notion of this being primarily about anatomy and physiology - it is a sensitive part of growing up and requires wisdom to steer between the rocks of dishonesty and the whirlpool of sentimentality. 

“Mervyn” writes:-

“Would you write something about the vexed question of sex education? It’s a thing I’ve thought about for years, and I’ve read all the books about it, and never been able to make up my mind as to what was the best way of dealing with the subject. And a lot of people are saying just now that we ought to teach all the facts about sex education to young people before they get themselves into difficulty and disease. It’s certainly awful to think that out of sheer ignorance anybody’s boy or girl can make a fatal mistake, but it is as simple as all that? Is there really nothing to it but giving information which has been withheld because of silly prejudice? What do the young people themselves feel about it? My own daughter of sixteen years has never (as far as I’ve seen) shown the slightest wish to learn anything about these things. Indeed, whenever I tried to lead the way to it (having in mind all I had read about the desirability of such teaching), she changed the subject. I should say that she definitely does not want to know about the facts of sex - or at any rate does not want me to talk about them. And we are very good friends. I don’t think it is only that she doesn’t want to discuss these matters with me - I have watched her and listened to her talk about life in general, and I should say that she has a genuine and all-round reserve about sex, which goes quite deep. Ought I to try to break that down? Should I get someone else to introduce her to the facts of life deliberately, perhaps by giving her a book on human anatomy and physiology? Is it wrong, or dangerous, to leave her ignorant and shy about such things? I do not want her to make mistakes out of an exaggerated innocence; but is there nothing of any value in her reserve? Is it not natural at her age? Is it not itself a safeguard - a safeguard, not only against bodily harm, but against too early a stirring of the deepest feelings? Isn’t her shyness about sex nature’s way of keeping the tremendous emotions connected with it out of reach until body and mind are more mature and equal to the demands it makes? I’ve pondered so long about these things, and have not been able to make up my mind. So I’ve been going slowly, and trying to watch and learn. I would like to hear what you think about this problem. 

            This is indeed a vexed and difficult problem. Certainly not “as simple as all that”. It is true that human beings are animals - and that all our lives are bound up with that fact. We are subject to the laws of biology, like any other animal. But we are very complex animals. Our feelings and imaginings, out personal history and our social relationships, are as “real”, as determining in our lives, as organic processes or infectious diseases. Not more real, or more important; but as real and as important - for human survival and human happiness. And far more difficult to deal with. That is why so many people with their eyes on the biological goal try to ride roughshod over feelings and purely personal considerations - they do present such knotty problems, which are not readily solved by experiment, do not easily lend themselves to the control of the scientist.

            “Sex education” is so much more than the giving of sound knowledge about the facts of mating and reproducing, about venereal diseases and their prevention.
Whether our children are going to remain chaste, find their mates and marital happiness and rear their own children satisfactorily, depends as much on the attitudes,the feelings, the quality of the sexual and human relationships, of their parents and teachers, as it does on any explicit teaching or information. Knowledge is an instrument, indispensable instrument of good living; but it is not a magic key, a panacea in and by itself. The good life is an intelligent, informed life. It were folly not to use all the knowledge which biology can give us. But knowledge has to be used; and it can be well or ill used. And how it is used depends on feelings, purposes, attitudes - in the sexual, no less than in other human relationships. Indeed, even more than in other relationships. 

            Sex education is, thus, going on all the time, whether we will it or not, from early childhood. It is going on day by day in all ways in which parents and teachers reveal to children their own feelings and essential attitudes to this basic human relationship - as well as by means of all the incidental information which children get, willy nilly, from births and marriages in their own families, from newspapers and books and pictures, from pets and visits to the Zoo or the country. Children are never in fact so ignorant about the facts of sex as they seem - to themselves as well as to others - to be. A great deal is seen and taken in out of the corner of the eye, so to speak; and stored securely in the mind - even if apparently for gotten or inaccessible, it is there unconsciously, and plays its part in the building up of attitudes.

            Unless a child in blind or deaf or very stupid, or has an abnormally sheltered life, he is bound to pick up the essential facts of the sexual relation and the origin of babies, from his ordinary experiences. We have to remember that these facts are not esoteric or entirely remote from his own being.  He has within himself - in his own bodily structure and his own feelings and impulses - the basic inherent readiness to understand what he sees and hears and reflects upon. Even if his observations and his thoughts are never put into explicit words I his own mind, he has an emotional understanding. And most children do put these things into words, in their early years, however tenaciously they reject their own knowledge later on.

            It is a very striking fact, one which has been observed many times, that children who have been ‘told the facts of life’ in answer to their early questions - at four or five years of age - are found at ten or eleven years to have ‘forgotten’ what they were told, and to have reverted to ‘gooseberry bush’, ‘stork’, or ‘doctor’s black bag’ theories, as if they had ‘never been told better’.Obviously this, in intelligent children can only happen because of feelings. It is easier for them to believe in these other theories than to accept the naked truth. However insistent their early questions, some emotional need arises, as they pass from five or six years to nine and ten years, to reject and repress their knowledge of the facts. The ‘gooseberry bush’ theories bring them some help in their emotional adjustments. And, as we all know, the majority of children in those middle years do attain a high degree of emotional adjustment. Compared with those younger and older than themselves, with the little child or the adolescent, children eight to twelve years are emotionally stable, independent of the adult and well adapted to the demands of their life at the time.

            The repression of sexual knowledge is but one part of the general flight from feeling and fantasy and from the world of the grown-ups which characterises the middle years. But with the approach of their own sexual maturity with the onset of bodily changes and all the stirrings of new impulse and fantasy which these bodily changes bring in early adolescence, this repression of thought and feeling largely breaks down. Whether he will or no, the boy (and little girl) in the teens ponders on his own feelings and sensations, on his own secret impulses and imaginings, on all that he has seen and heard in life of the relations between men and women. He longs and fears, fulfils himself in imagination, flies in deep anxiety from the thought of this very fulfilment, longs to seek, but no less intensely dreads the test of actual experience. In many boys and some girls, much if this conflict of feeling and imagining is a quite conscious struggle. In some boys and most girls, it is very largely unconscious - but no less real and intense for that. 

            This is the field into which we set our seeds of ‘information’ - that facts of bodily structure and process, of ingermination, gestation, birth, sexual health and disease, birth control, and so on and so forth. We are not teaching cold facts or indifferent truths. boys and girls can never be cool or indifferent to these facts. The extraordinary statement is sometimes made - and made even by married people and parents - that we ought to deal with these things “quite simply and naturally - just as we would with any other facts such as geography or mathematics”!!! But these facts are notlike any other facts. The biology of sex and reproduction in the human being is bound up with the most intimate, the most vital and the most tremendous feelings, aims and impulses. It is the central core of all human relationships, the heart of human happiness or tragedy, the basis of human society. No-one – not even the biologist - can deal with them with entire calm and coolness, except by detaching them from their personal meanings. The biologist can do that, temporarily for the purposes of his science. But he can no more do that in his personal life than the rest of us can. 

            And the boy or girl in the teens, with all his surging untired wishes and deep anxieties, is quite incapable of the cool detachment of the scientist, or of the mature student of human life. We may be able to help him reach a greater degree of cool understanding than her would otherwise have – by our own approach to his need for knowledge. But we shall not give him this help if we ignore his feelings and childishly assume a detachment which is altogether out of reach. 

            Sometimes he an appearto attain it. If the teachers upon whom he depends so much are quite impervious to his conflict of feeling, so secure in their prejudice against feeling and their insistence on being “natural” – (denying the fact that feelings are natural – that they are completely blind to everything but their own belief in the magic of “information” – he can and does very often bury and hide his feelings and play the game of detached inquiry and discussion. But at a tremendous cost! At the price of unreality, of a dissociation in his inner world or private guilt and distress, of an impoverishment of feeling in his sexual life later on. We may thus save him (but not always) from venereal disease; but we may at the same time prevent his finding full complete happiness in his mating.

            But these two aims of health and happiness do not necessarily exclude each other. It is possible to reach both  - by being willing to look at allthe facts – the facts of feeling as well as those of anatomy  and physiology, the life of the mind as well as the life of the body.  

            I fully agree with you that the reserve of most adolescent girls  - and many boys – has its meaning and value. It is their defence against overmastering wish and anxiety, a bulwark against feelings which their immature powers of control and judgement would not be equal to. And to try to break it down by deliberate attack or contempt may do serious damage. Our problem is how to give knowledge in a helpful way, without doing violence to feelings , without fostering either a contempt for sex or a dread of it. Since neither contempt and a too greedy fulfilment on the one hand, nor dread and denial on the other, will bring personal satisfaction, family happiness or social stability. 

            In spite of the fact that children so often ‘forget’ (i.e.repress) their knowledge, it is a good thing to answer their questions, when they ask them – at three, four and five years, or at any other age. It is a good thing , not so much because the actual facts then given, but because of the attitudesthus expressed. If our children can feel that they canget information when they want it, that we do not ourselves feel that sex is so bad and shameful that it must be denied or hidden, that it can be spoken of and understood, that we are simple and honest about it, they have got something of permanent value, which they are not likely to lose altogether again. They will know, in later years, that they can come to us when they are puzzled or curious, when they want to learn and understand. And this will remain, underneath their lack of interest, their repression of knowledge , in the middle years of childhood; and will anchor them in the storm and stress of early adolescent curiosity, doubt and fear. 

            There is no doubt as to what our own attitude should be, all through. Here is knowledge, if you want it and can take it. I will not only answer your questions, but will teach you how to answer your own. The biological facts of mating and gestation and birth lie open to your inquiry and understanding. They can be known. But in your own time, at your own pace. They are useless unless they can be taken in with the whole mind, can be trusted and felt as good. If you cannot come to this today, you may tomorrow. Wait, wait on your own mind, on your ripening powers to know, to understand and to assimilate. You will feel less shy and anxious later on, as you get more used to yourself in this new phase of life; and I am always at your service, for the help of knowledge of experience, or of mere fellow feeling. 

            These things may not be, are not often, put into words. But boys and girls know when their parents and teachers feel in this way. And such an attitude does more than anything else to help them through the years of conflict and difficulty.

            Much can be usefully done in the way of indirect teaching before adolescence. The early knowledge remains underneath, and becomes again available for understanding in the later years, if emotional attitudes in the latter years of emotional attitudes are favourable. And in the middle years, the tending of pets keeps knowledge open. At eleven, twelve and thirteen years of age, if not before, a good deal of general biology can be taught – including the facts of mating and reproduction in animals other than man. Children make their own application of these general facts to human life, implicitly in not explicitly. Many children in the early teens will quite easily discuss these applications to human life; and the subject can be dealt with in class. 

            But soon there comes the period of natural reserve – and with some children sooner than others. And such, reserve needs to be respected  - it is a sign of emotional stirring that presages, but it is very far from being, sexual maturity. And the bloom cannot be rubbed off the fruit without damage. 

            Some boys and girls will be merely reluctant to discuss these things in class, but will talk freely and simply alone with a wise teacher; some will talk readily with friends of their own sex, and a chosen adult. Others will for a time flee from the whole subject whenever and wherever it be met. This is, of course, an excessive anxiety, which may indicate a neurosis, or may be won through if nothing untoward disturbs their development. Such boys and girls (they are more often girls) can often be greatly helped by an adult who understands their reserve, does not ride rough-shod over it , and yet is not intimidated by it, one who can feel his way and give such knowledge and in such a form that it can be taken. An experienced headmaster can do much for the shy and reserved boy, the wise older woman for the girl. But class teaching or discussion in groups is often unbearable – and is rarely, very rarely, desirable, for boys or girls, even in one sex groups, between thirteen and seventeen years.

            For the very great majority of adolescents, if not for all, their own parents are the very last people with whom they wish to discuss the facts of sex. Even when parents and children are excellent friends, it is better to leave this matter to other teachers. It puts an enormous emotional strain upon the young boy or girl to hear these things and talk them over with his father or mother. (This is in contrast to the very young child, of three to six years with whom mothers and fathers  are the natural teachers as to “where babies come from”. 

            So that you will see that I would certainly not suggest that you should deliberately try to undermine your daughter’s reserve. But I would think it desirable to let her understand that if and when she wanted explicit knowledge it would be available for her – either in the form of reading in Biology, or of discussion with some sensible married woman – preferably a mother herself. (There are unmarried headmistresses of great human wisdom; but not all experienced teachers, with much learning, are gifted to deal with these issues. it does demand wisdom, more than knowledge. 

            As regards reading or lectures, what teaching is given should be absolutely simple and direct and complete - and unsentimental. And the “facts of sex” should be given in their proper setting of the anatomy and physiology of the body as a whole. They should not be singled out for treatment sottovoce, nor should they be made the only too obvious centre for snippets of general anatomy and physiology. Children see through these pretences – just as they do through the silliness of approaching the facts of human biology through a sickly sentimental account of pollination and germination in flowers. The botanical facts are much harder for children to observe and to appreciate than sexual and family relationships in animals; and children know what a sham it is to start from flowers  - how we are pretendingto make everything so sweet and innocent – which only means that we don’t really feel that they are. This, the sentimental  and sanctimonious way, is the wrongway  to cope with the doubts and anxieties of youth. 

            It needs much wisdom to steer between the rocks of dishonesty and the whirlpool of sentimentality.But that is the art of human life as a whole, isn’t it? – and not alone of this special aspect of life. 

“