James Marchant in "Birth-Rate and Empire," "and the assumption that they
are ignorant of notorious facts. We cannot, if we would, stop the spread
of sexual knowledge; and if we could do so, we would only make matters
infinitely worse. This is the second decade of the twentieth century,
not the early Victorian period.... It is no longer a question of knowing
or not knowing. We have to disabuse our middle-aged minds of that fond
delusion. Our young people know more than we did when we began our
married lives, and sometimes as much as we know, ourselves, even now. So
that we need not continue to shake our few remaining hairs in simulating
feelings of surprise or horror. It might have been better for us if we
had been more enlightened. And if our discussion of this problem is to
be of any real use, we must at the outset reconcile ourselves to the
fact that the birth-rate is voluntarily controlled.... Certain persons
who instruct us in these matter, hold up their pious hands and whiten
their frightened faces as they cry out in the public squares against
`this vice,' but they can only make themselves ridiculous."
Taught upon the basis of conventional and traditional morality and
middle-class respectability, based on current dogma, and handed down to
the populace with benign condescension, sex education is a waste of time
and effort. Such education cannot in any true sense set up as a standard
the ideal morality and behavior of the respectable middle-class and then
make the effort to induce all other members of society, especially the
working classes, to conform to their taboos.
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