Education: Books v. Tunnel

Three summers ago a group of eleven serious thinkers—among them, Robert S. Lynd (Middletown) and Margaret Mead (Sex & Temperament)—dismayed by the insecurity, the bewilderment, the crimes of the younger generation, gathered at Hanover, N. H., under the sponsorship of the General Education Board to consider what needed to be done to restore reason and balance to modern juvenile life. They had learned that to the usual perplexities of adolescents in all times there had been added since the War new worries accompanying profound changes in the structure and tempo of society.

Because the “turbulent younger generation” was “either surprisingly ignorant or surprisingly well versed in things that aren’t so,” the Hanover conferees agreed something must be done, turned over their sombre data to a Commission on Human Relations subsequently set up by the Progressive Education Association and financed by the Rockefeller General Education Board, to provide for Youth, parents and teachers the facts of modern life that they needed to solve contemporary problems. This sizable order was undertaken by a group of educators, writers and scientists who prepared a series of nine books with such titles as Society & Family Living, Do Adolescents Need Parents?, Literature & Human Relations and last spring the commission began sending six of the nine to 100 U. S. high schools and colleges. Last week the commission ran into its first public opposition.

One of the problems which the “Hanover group” believed to be most perplexing to young folk was Sex. This generation of parents, the conferees believed, is too busy or too puzzled to give adequate answers to its children’s sex questions. U. S. high schools, the Commission on Human Relations later found, which receive Youth at the age when the sex problem is most insistent, have made slight progress in the past 17 years toward providing this information. In a survey by the U. S. Public Health Service and American Social Hygiene Association in 1920, only 8% of the nation’s high schools reported they gave coordinated sex instruction; eight years later only 10% did so. The commission, ten years after, convinced that the missing information had not yet been supplied, declared: “. . . If. as is held in some quarters, high-school youngsters are learning all they ought to know about sex in their biology and hygiene courses, their questions certainly do not show it.”

The commission’s book which was provided to clear up U. S. juveniles’ ignorance about sex problems is Dr. Alice Virginia Keliher’s Life & Growth. It begins with a discussion of inferiority complexes, goes on to dispel adolescents’ fears of abnormality, and culminates with two chapters called “From Child to Man” and “Growing Pains,” which treat the physiology of procreation with great candor. It was these that sent Philadelphia public school officials running for cover last week.

Between adjoining South Philadelphia High School for Boys and South Philadelphia High School for Girls is a dim, twisting tunnel. Last year a member of the Philadelphia Board of Education informed the board that in its secluded places went on “things that are not proper.” The principal of the girls’ school, concerned about this ”ugly proof that the school was not providing a complete education, sent for the commission’s books. Soon a great hubbub was raised among citizens who thought that the books, if given the children, would be worse than the tunnel. Psychiatrist Alfred Gordon bellowed that sex instruction in the schools would fill young brains with “notions of a most serious character,” bring on an exchange of views and “distortion,” lead to “perversion . . . and neurotic disturbances.” The tall, grizzled, dictatorial Superintendent of Schools, Edwin Cornelius Broome, himself the author of four textbooks dealing with sex “in a properly delicate way,” snapped: “The course has not been approved. No action will be taken upon it until it has been fully studied.”

In Manhattan, plump Dr. Keliher, chairman of the commission, quickly retorted: “It is the distortions in young minds indicated by the questions they asked that we hope to straighten out by presenting in an honest and medically accurate way the answers to their inevitable questions. We insist these questions be answered in the proper context of the whole story of life and growth.”

Progressive Educator Keliher has been hearing those questions since, at the age of 20, she began to teach in Washington’s (D. C.) elementary schools 14 years ago. After studying primary education in Europe, she became an instructor at Yale’s Institute of Human Relations (1930-33), then supervisor of elementary schools in Hartford, Conn. (1933-35). Since then, as chairman of the Commission on Human Relations, she has gone about the country (flying 20,000 mi.) asking young people questions and answering theirs. A girl asks how to lose 15 Ib. Another wants to know whether intelligence tests are accurate, for “if they are I shall not go to college or care what becomes of me.” Others: Am I normal? What is death? Why is a baby red when it is born? Is sex love? Is it true that repressed people who have no sex experiences cannot paint, or write, or act? What happens when you pet a lot?

These questions Dr. Keliher and the commission believe they have the answers to in Life & Growth and its companion volumes. For moral taboos they try to substitute pragmatic guides to the satisfying life. To help young people make up their minds to marry early, the authors suggest overthrow of the taboo against the wife working, still strong outside U. S. metropolitan centres. Marriage and the family are potently buttressed with stories of happy domestic experiences. The authors load the arguments against sex relations before marriage: Sometimes such experiences are not destructive, but most of those who have tried free love warn of its psychological dangers: a high proportion, of boys still want to marry a virgin. The same principle holds for petting. Youth must choose on the basis of “what memories and what expectations you want to carry into marriage and what creative uses you might be making of the same energy by restraining intimate, intense and sexually exciting petting.” It is suggested intimate caresses will have more meaning if reserved for the life partner.

Far from discouraged by the Philadelphia set back, the Commission on Human Relations this week sent to 20 schools films (largely excerpts from commercial pictures such as Cavalcade, Fury) showing human problems and what to do about them. A radio campaign along the same lines will soon take to the air.