Stork v. Facts
Awkward Questions of Childhood. By T. F. Tucker • and Muriel Pout. (Howe. 3s. ed.) THE children of this country are growing up in a world in which not even a water biscuit can be advertised without sex appeal. Sex is today the great drug of screen, stage and -hoarding, and " Day by day children and adolescents are being subjected to stimuli from which the previous generation were sheltered." Many teachers and most psychologists are dissatisfied with this state of things because, with all this appeal to emotion, many children get facts neither from parent or school.
Mr. Tucker and Miss Pout conducted a very interesting experiment a few years ago, during which, at the request of the parents, they gave sex instruction to a large number of boys and girls at school. They published an exceedingly valuable book (Sex Education in Schools) as a result of their classes. But though they had undoubtedly succeeded un- expectedly well, and gave some eleven hundred children a sensible and unalarmed outlook on an important subject, they were no more convinced at the end than they had been at the beginning that the ideal place to give sex instruction is a school, or the right age eleven plus. They still held that the right age to give information is when the child asks for it, and that the parent is the right person to answer the child's questions. But their experience is that too many parents and teachers shirk this necessary part of their work. Such parents declare that in the first place they do not know how to answer the questions in comparative anatomy that children from four upwards are apt to ask, and further that they find many of these questions embarrassing, and so can- not answer in the simple, matter-of-fact manner which they know to be the right one.
This new book, Awkward Questions of Childhood, is thus designed by the authors of Sex Education in Schools to help such parents to carry out the task laid upon them by their children and the authors. Though to the educationist it will not perhaps prove as interesting as their former book, yet it should prove of very great value to the much larger public who need its counsels. Its arrangement is most ingenious and simple, and the tone is one of clarity and good sense. A girl of fourteen, to whom the present reviewer showed the book, objected to some instances of sentimentality which she detected ; but the reviewer, knowing how great an improvement this work is on most of its kind, and how courageous its authors had been, felt disinclined to criticize. This is a book which will prove of real service to the many children whose parents take their job seriously, but who yet find it hard not to hand on their own difficulties over a subject charged with ancient fears and taboos.
A. Wuxisms-ELLis.
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