SEX EDUCATION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS [To the Editor of
the SPECTATOR.] - .
Sin,—As a correspondent has called attention in your columns to the problem of sex education in our Public Schools, it may be interesting to record that the subject is being seriously tackled among boys of similar age in American universities. To matriculate at seventeen is very common in the United States—a practice which may account there for the four years' residence requirement for a degree instead of our three—and at Princeton, for example, attendance at a course in hygiene is compulsory for first-year- men. While these lectures are mainly concerned with the usual matters of health such as diet and the teeth, the concluding lectures are devoted to a full discussion of the main aspects of sex.
Another not irrelevant provision is a compulsory medical and physical examination of each student on entering the university, on the basis of which he is given advice as to his physical activities and is encouraged to pursue the particular athletic most suited to his needs. Attendance is also required of freshmen at physical training classes which, if open to objection as curtailing the undergraduate's liberty, at least prevents the sudden cleavage from compulsory school games which is so common at our English universities and is obviously in many cases an unhealthy change.
In view of Judge Lindsey's widely noticed books and utterances on the so-called " companionate marriage," the impression seems to be held in some quarters that perversion of traditional standards regarding sex is very common among American youth at the present time. I have never visited Denver, on which the Judge bases his charge—in other matters, strange to say, the Middle West appears to be the home of Puritan conservatism ; but certainly I observed no evidence of this departure during a year which I spent recently as a visiting undergraduate at Princeton. Without desiring to suggest competition in this matter between the two countries, I am bound to admit that the tone of the Princeton undergraduates compared very favourably with that of their Cambridge counterparts among whom I later found myself.
Whether this advantage is attributable to, the hygiene lectures I have not sufficient experience to say : but your readers need have no serious doubt about the morale of American youth, whose student representatives recalled to the late Mr. John St. Loe Strachey—to quote American Soundings—" the glorious beings of my own undergraduate
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