Sex in Bronxville

Youth, receptive to novel ideas, would be spared many of the embarrassments and discomforts of adolescence if it were given early education in sex. This few people deny. Yet, in practice, sex education is usually delayed until a time when The Facts of Life occasion acute nervousness, ribaldry or disgust. In spite of the fact that this is well-known, the movement for public sex education has gone slowly, necessarily from the higher branches downwards. Last week there came evidence of its present situation. Willard Walcott Beatty, superintendent of schools in Bronxville. N. Y., wrote for the New York Times an account of the seventh-grade course which has been given in his schools for the last five years.

Called "Elementary Biology," it is given to segregated groups of boys and girls, 11 & 13 years old, during an 18 to 36-week period. So that the segregation may not engender suspicion, the class alternates with physical education classes, where segregation occurs normally. Beginning with the simplest of biological forms, the course first takes up asexual (sperm-less, eggless) forms. Then come plants & animals which contain both male & female apparatus; then males & females which reproduce by fertilization, internal or external. Lastly come the anatomical, social and ethical features of Man's sexual organization.

Parents are informed beforehand of the nature of the course; children are urged to carry home the classroom discussions. Parents and teachers, reports Superintendent Beatty, find Elementary Biology useful; many believe that it should be taught sooner, in the fifth or sixth grade.

Pioneers in sex education were the late Dr. Prince Morrow, the late great Charles William Eliot of Harvard University and members of the American Federation for Sex Hygiene who in 1914 helped found the American Social Hygiene Association. Director today of the Association's Division of Educational Measures and Consultant is Dr. Max Joseph Exner. Austrian-born 60 years ago, Dr. Exner was at 19 an expert gymnast, took a Y. M. C. A. course in physical education, became physical education director at Carleton College (Northfield, Minn.). Meanwhile he took college courses, studied medicine, took his M. D. degree in 1906. As director of sex education for the Y. M. C. A., he went to the border during the U. S.-Mexican strife in 1915, reported on Prostitution in Army camps. His reports worried people, proved him able, won him the post of director of Social Hygiene education for the U. S. Army in the World War. He began working for the American Social Hygiene Association in 1920.

Colleges. In the Journal of Social Hygiene this month, Dr. Exner reports on The Status of Sex Education in the Colleges, on the basis of replies from 111 institutions of 300 questioned. In large institutions, including most of the State universities, social hygiene is given the least attention. In smaller colleges better courses are found. Types of instruction vary from a mere skirting of venereal disease or some pointers on the care of children to a comprehensive study of marital relations. The oldtime lecture which, says Dr. Exner, was either a gruesome "smut-talk" during which many a student would faint, or "sentimental moralizing, exaggeration and pseudo-science . . . by itinerant speakers of the evangelistic variety . . ." has happily gone out of fashion. Nevertheless, he concludes, though there has been conspicuous progress in the last 20 years, the proportion of institutions giving an adequate sexual background for marital and social life is still small.

Elementary Schools. A pioneer educator in sex was Professor Harry Beal Torrey of the University of Oregon who in 1920 helped introduce biological instruction in grade schools in The Dalles, Ashland and Newberg, Ore. Prime features, repeatedly demonstrated since then, were that young children found innocent fun in watching earthworms, frogs, spiders undergo life processes. Parents often became alarmed if they found their children observing animals whose activities resembled too closely those of man. Some mothers even thought it "unladylike" for their small daughters to handle caterpillars. Another observation: Small moppets were seriously, naively interested in the reproductions of plants and of oviparous (egg-laying) animals; but when viviparous (birth-giving) forms appeared there were snickers and knowing looks from sophisticated youngsters. To correct this, teachers worked patiently until the subject had lost glamor, until children were unconcerned by such words as anus, sperm, ovary, excretion, etc.

First college to give credit for a teacher's course in sex education was the University of Cincinnati. Best teacher-training under State auspices is in Virginia. In Alabama, Washington, in Minneapolis, and in Winnetka, Ill., where Superintendent Beatty of Bronxville first experimented with sex-in-nature courses, the movement was advanced. The A. S. H. A. is chary of making extensive surveys: it must be. There still are many parents throughout the land who, if they hear that Sex threatens their offspring, will rise in anger.

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