What Is Sex After All?

By DAVID HOLBROOK 130 not believe in sex education. I consider I that it does more harm than good to isolate and specialise sex, like another of the 'subjects,' and suppose that a lesson or two in the mechanics and facts of sex is sufficient to edu- cate a primary flame of our being. Sex is part of a whole complex, and a large, burning part of our wholeness. It burns our children as fiercely as it burns us who are grown up. But even sup- posing there is such a subject as sex education, can it ever be carried out? Can you really tell children, in the artificial atmosphere of the class- room, about the processes of eroticism, about the secret mysteries of physical love? Few teachers, surely, will have sufficient balance in their own lives to handle sex in such a context, without embarrassment or distaste? And so the gap be- tween the shame-filled awareness of the children and the shame-tinged, or cynicism-tinged, attitude of the struggling teacher could only in- crease the fear and inadequacy of the children's life-flames. Certainly 'sex education' would seem to me something that no one in his senses, knowing what things—and people—are like. would advocate. How, for instance, is sex dis- cussed in the school staff-room?

I don't mean the biological facts of reproduc- tion. Children should know these before eleven. My own children asked about the foetus, the egg and the seed, and how they got there, before the age of nine, and were given direct answers as they were when they asked about birds hatching eggs. Later, w hen teenagers are living an active sexual life, then they need to be given books of advice on codes of sexual behaviour, to protect them from the predatory sick wolves and nymphs of our time: such books, written from much experience in youth work, as Boy Meets Girl and Facts of Life for Teenagers, by Evelyn Millis Duvall (Argo, 8s. 6d.). By sixteen children have virtually an adult responsibility for their own sexual behaviour, and thus it is appropriate that they should read to themselves, and prepare themselves explicitly and inwardly for the over- whelming, and necessary, experience of sexual adventure. They must go through with it alone. Without sexual adventure we should have no courtship, and no new generation.

But between eleven and fifteen, while children are in the hands of the school, they need edu- cating sexually. And yet, as I have said, sex education, as a subject, explicit discussion of love processes, can only be something gross. (Of course, if children feel they can go to a member of the staff for individual discussion of their sexual problems that is something fine, and different.) But how, then, can we educate secondary children sexually? The answer is in the answer I made recently to someone in authority who questioned whether an English lesson was the appropriate place for a dis- cussion on marriage. English is the subject by which true culture of the feelings can be given: English is the true education of the life-flame. And if we don't give it, then it will be given by Reveille, television 'love' plays, and the tor ten-pop racket. The children's tender awareness of sex i3 being exploited by big business: and its titillating knowingness is summed up for MC by the picture above from a little girl's comic: strip-tease for babies. And children are being given a completely packaged Brave New World of sexual awareness, from commercial sources' while the schools, on the whole, give nothing except some general 'safe' moral atmosphere: Even in a distinguished girls' grammar school ! visited recently most of the girls are devoted hep-cats; with an implanted antipathy to tile, traditional arts, the true sources of wisdom. An they only have three periods of English a Wet' For atl literature! And how many teachers date to insist that feelings—love among them—are the most important things in life? Yet it is so. Thus, when children come to deal with matters of the heart, their vocabulary is pathetically inept, and unbeautiful : I know a girl

She is a tart One look at her sends you in a whirl

And if I had my way we never will part. 10 She's got a complexion like peaches and cre' r But of her I can only dream.

She doesn't know I exist.

By her I'll never be kissed. For a moment in her arms I give anything. When I think of her I hear wedding bells ring.

Boy, 14, 'B' streata.

My heart is occupied at last The age of loneliness is past All my dreams are coming true Because I'm in love with you.

Boy, 15, 'A' stream.0 In prose the children are more successful 1 escaping from the clichés to do with the sesti a as r problems with which they are living. Here is o5 as successful piece by a girl who obviously re's0 app much pulp-book fiction: she writes better th3 ells, the pulp books, in a strangely childish way: id abo The night club was drab and dreary in the t°te (the drab town and I was just above to give UP to the goast and go. But just at that moment as of ro clock struck ten she walked in and the placed is ....„ full of her pugnent perfume which float°lid the air like stale food. . . . I got up and str° knowing I would be at her mercy as soon as I looked at her. . . .

Girl, 13, 'B' stream.

they in children's imaginative work, 'Hey are given the right kind of respected con- ditions of fictional exploration, we find that their verbal imaginative equipment to deal with sex is 'educated' more at the-moment by undesir- able sources than by the school—the reason being that the schools do not yet sufficiently believe that EngliSh is the appropriate place for such ulseussions as that of marriage: A strange boy walk in and stood looking at lane as if he had not seen a girl before. lane turn her head and look the other way. . .

Girl, 14, 'B' stream. there was a very funny man who was staring at mY friend all the way home when we got of the bus he got of two and he followed us down the road so we went into a lady's dress shop and "t of the back door and thats how we got rid him. Girl, 14, 'B' stream.

they and Tony had been engaged two years. 'neY were very happy up till three months ago then b they started quarelling Pam broke off tp", t, "gagedment and Tony threatened to kill to m' Pam did not believe Tony and laggh at '"' he hit her on the face. . . .

Girl, 14, 'B' stream. ni,.,Aus, my friend and were walking home one u;bui by a wood a car stopped and asked us if a,e 'wanted a lift 'I said no but my friend said sShe was very foolish as she did not know aid mall. I had never seen him before but she id she had seen him'at a dance. Even, Girl, 14, 'B' stream. up?, a 'De), asking, 'What will it be like to grow °asentially is engaged in sexual self-education, go9,„ne night I went down to a ub and ws lo—g to have a night on the beer.p there wasa a rlfhellireY mates that I work with down there were buying rounds of beer as I got liere. A round of beer Means that one person boYds a drink for all of his mates and then sum- Y else does it next.

"' the Boy, 14, 'B' stream. 4 1, ite e conventional response to these pieces as foil" of 'Nora in an English lesson would be sPhro,,°ws' Firstly, the subject is perhaps not tassinPriate for school: for children to be dis- sboutg, matters of sexual behaviour, to talk (tb g'ing on the beer,' to call a girl a `tart' th:Ligh Word on) ° "Viles)--this might bring criticism utsidet • Le., this work is not respectable. and not safe. Thus, 'social man' says, let us not touch these fires, and be safe. Secondly, the spelling is bad. The teacher would be better off spending his time improving their spelling and leave sex to sex education periods. And the grammar! Where is the evidence that I have taught these children English?

But these pedagogic remarks are all beside the point : or largely so, even though such attitudes determine nearly all English teaching.

What makes us civilised are those powers which help us deal with the fluxes of our being. Sex is the fiercest of these fluxes. And these powers are largely derived from our use of words—English words. By the English language we develop our intelligent understanding of what happens to us in life. We gain with it wisdom from the experience of others who lived in the past. We are not just told this wisdom : we feel it, through imaginative works, 'felt in the blood and felt along the heart.' And we use language, with the other arts, particularly painting (which comes before verbal literacy in the child), to ex- plore and order our experience by the power of imagination. And we explore other possible ex- perience. Thus we develop our powers to deal with life. And, ergo, it is most appropriate to deal with such subjects as marriage in the English lesson.

For there we discover that our joys and sor- rows, are not ours in isolation: they are ex- perienced by all humanity. And they have been dealt with by different degrees of moral stamina, from that of Gwendolen Harleth, to that of Betty Sorrell, or Paul Morel, or Leopold Bloom, or Birkin and Ursula. The Bible, Shakespeare, folk- song,. poetry, drama, and the novel (invented for the exploration, virtually, of sexual maters) are our repository of wisdom, and, at that, largely wisdom about love. And a proper training in the imagiriative word is a training for the whole being, of the culture of the feelings. This is the true sex education, because it links sex, the life- flanie, with the whole pattern of our existence, as it should properly be linked. Sexual wisdom in folksong, in modern poetry, in the modern short story must be brought to our children, within the limits of delicate-stepping decency. And child- ren's ow'n stories and poems are their own means to explore their own growth.

But English as such a source of felt wisdom is more and more neglected in schools. Teachers and authorities shrink from it. Yet there is a great fuss about 'sex education.' But no one's fire surely burned brighter for a film or a television programme showing millions of sperms chasing umpteen ova? No one came to be able to live all their lives in love through a couple of hours' lectures on sexual performance, surely? A sexual inability—and all of us have sexual inabilities of one kind or another—is the index of a total weakness of personality. Yet we believe that by a little 'sex education' we can put matters right.

We 'can't. The home has collapsed as a primary source of traditional emotional wisdom. The child gains his knowledge of the fires of sex from . dirty stories: and there shame breeds fear and impotence. The commercial world titillates. And while children are subject to this essentially im- mature--if not diseased—sex from big busiriess, they are little babies, in their souls. Here are pieces written by pupils of thirteen who write as above, but also suck their thumbs in class: here is a profoundly disturbing child-version of the CEdipus myth: One day a man killed me I have been looking for him All my life I am a ghost now that me I found him with my mumuey I killed that man Like he killed me He die on my Mummy nee Boy, 13.

—here a nursery-rhyme-style verse, full of feeling, by the girl author of the 'night club' piece above: . . . Little boy runs with his plump little mum And the ducks cried out What a matter Girl, 13.

'What a matter,' `My mummy nee'—these are babes. Yet they are growing deeper voices, al- ready, and their girl friends in class are growing breasts. The complex ground of eleven to fifteen is delicate and dangerous, and we need to tread warily. But we must begin, and lead the children on through such disturbances by the creative imagination. For, as a little girl said to me this week, 'If we don't begin to get to know each other now, when we need to get to know each other we shan't know anything about each other!'