Darlington Conf. ? 1965
COEDUCATION and SEX
When we put boys and girls together in a school, especially in a boarding school, we are producing a sexual situation. This is so obvious that it is difficult now to imagine that teachers ever failed to recognise it. Yet, so I have heard, in the early days of coeducational boarding schools, if boys and girls fell in love it was regarded as “silly”, and attempts were made to inhibit any such manifestations by the scorn implied in that word. It has been suggested that this policy of repressing sexuality in the coeducational situation produced frigidity in some of the girls involved. I hope there are no coeducational schools in which such a policy persists.
On the other hand, having created a sexual situation, we are responsible for what happens; we must not leave it to take just another course, hoping that an attitude of supposed trust will avoid trouble. This may be to abandon the children concerned, not only to impulses within themselves that they are not ready to direct properly, but also to powerful external forces over which they have no control.
The sexuality of boys and girls, like every other human drive, needs control and direction – and education. The control must not be by repression, for this may be to damage their sexuality, as suggested above. It must be through a process that accepts and welcomes sexuality, however great the difficulties it may create. We must accept sexuality just as we accept the impulse to vigorous physical activity, as an immensely valuable human endowment that can be nourished and educated. This is a wider concept than sublimation, for sublimation too often implies an attempt to side-track the sexual impulse because we are afraid of it and wish it did not exist.
Not that there is no reason for fear. We can give the impulse to violent activity a full outlet in a rugger game or in chopping down a tree with an axe. But the full expression of the sexual impulse, which is actually possible in the early teens, is incompatible with the rest of our educational needs and provisions, and it could bring education to an end. So for practical reasons, if not for ethical or religious reasons, we inevitably distrust sexuality and have to live within a contradiction of fear and acceptance. But contradiction that is acknowledged need not be harmful; there are inevitably many such contradictions in human life. The harm, if any, is done in the attempt to escape by turning acceptance into repudiation – by wishing away the sexuality of our pupils.
There is no necessary harm in having to live through a conflict. A conflict is not a neurosis; it is through the way the personality deal with conflict that we produce a neurosis or avoid one. The deepest and most penetrative thoughts of mankind have come through having to face a conflict. Man is made for difficulty, not only the difficulty produced by his environment, but also the difficulty produced by his ambivalent and turbulent nature. It is in line with this that the most promising of human relationships, the sexual, should offer the most difficulty; that the deepest of experiences should often be prepared for through the most disturbing of initiations.
It is not surprising that the coeducational boarding schools were pioneers in the early development of sex-education. They had to face the situation they had created. In a single-sex school it is possible to forget the need for sex-education, or at least to limit it to passing manifestations such as masturbation. But in a coeducational school the whole field of sexual relationships is necessarily opened up, both in relation to the present and the future of the boys and girls under our care. The more progressive coeducational schools have been responsible for the continuing development of sex-education chiefly for the reason that, unlike most other schools, they have been primarily concerned with boys and girls as persons developing in relationship rather than as minds to be trained.
The first efforts in sex-education were restricted to the giving of anatomical and physiological information, to satisfy justifiable curiosity and to remove ignorance that might be responsible for failure and suffering in the marriage relationship. I began this work early in the thirties when teaching at Bedales, and the open and fearless relationship possible there between children and staff quickly brought other needs to our attention, made it apparent that much more was needed. Even if we assumed that every child would find his or her way safely into the respectability of marriage, we had to recognise that for this, the most demanding of all human adventures, no conscious preparation was given. Why did we assume that we could not produce physicists without a long preparation in mathematics, yet allow people to attempt living for forty or fifty years with another person with no preparation at all?
So sex education had now to include education for marriage, with reference in passing to the problems of courtship, to venereal disease – and to premarital intercourse as an experience to be avoided. This was a big enough development for its time. It involved a married teacher sharing with his or her pupils some of the fruits of married experience, not only concerning the physical experience, but also the intimate relationship of men and women as persons and their problems as parents.
Since the second world war there has been a further opening up of the facts about sexual relationships and experience; this has shown that yet more is needed. I had already been prepared for this by the results of a questionnaire sent out just before the war to young people after they had left school. This showed that though they were grateful for the information they had been given at school, they still had to cope with bewilderment, frustration, and especially the unexpected impact on them of other and very different personalities.
A sex-education that assumes that all, or even most, young people can follow the straight and narrow path of morality into the assumed safety of marriage is unimaginative, unrealistic and inadequate. It leaves many injured by the wayside without any Samaritan to attend to them. It illustrates the futility of an education primarily concerned with being good and doing the right thing – an education in pharisaism. It fails to recognise that there is often a conflict between warm-heartedness and morality, as Jesus recognised in his encounter with the women of Bethany. It may be wise for a motorist to plan his journey so that he can avoid rough roads, but when the journey is into the unknown – and life is always like that – it is much more important that his car should be strongly built and well-sprung, so that it will not be shattered by the rocks and pot-holes he may unexpectedly meet. Idealism in sex-education my leave a young man or woman rigid and brittle, totally unprepared for the real crisis into which life plunges him, unable to adjust to the fact that no man or woman is ever ideal. My own studies over the past few years have made one fact among others abundantly clear. We have always taken it that sex will explode frequently in the lives of the “worst”, but we have now to recognise that it explodes frequently – if unexpectedly and painfully – into the lives of the “best”.
A coeducational school provides the conditions in which reality can be understood and progressively faced. A single-sex school, it seems to me, simply asks for unreal attitudes, even in spite of the efforts of sensible teachers to the contrary. I had evidence of this in the reaction of a group of girls from a girls’ boarding school to the pamphlet “Towards a Quaker View of Sex”. Their principal objection seemed to be that it dealt with unpleasant facts. I had to reply by referring to the experience of some of my own girl pupils who had subsequently become child care officers or psychiatric social workers. The difference between the coeducational and the singe-sex school is probably more marked in the case of girls than of boys. A boy’s sexuality may become distorted in the absence of the other sex, he may become fixed in the homosexual phase; but he remains obviously a sexual being, to himself and to others. A girl’s sexuality can be repressed to an extraordinary extent and she may remain profoundly ignorant of her own nature. She may grow on into adult life without knowing what she is doing; and what she is doing my be to create havoc.
In a coeducational school, though some may not be touched by it at all, boys may pass through the homosexual phase when, for instance, mutual masturbation occurs. Sometimes this becomes a matter of anxious concern, when it becomes a cult associated with sadistic bullying, but more usually the boys pass out of it quickly and without anything having to be done about it. Instances of boys growing up in a coeducational boarding school and remaining homosexual are extremely rare. I have had recently an instance of an 11-year old boy coming into our bottom form obsessed with masturbation. He called every possible attention to his activities; but his effect on the group was not to create a similar obsession in others. It was to produce a disturbance that quickly brought the matter to my notice. When I had the boy removed – not because of the masturbation, but because of associated deeply neurotic tendencies that needed psychiatric treatment – there was general relief. An intrusion into their life had been removed. I would not wish to argue from a single instance of this sort, and one cannot collect enough evidence to be of statistical value; but the instance does fit into a general impression that continued homosexuality is not wanted by boys in a coeducational school and they are glad to grow out of it.
Under coeducational conditions a girl comes to recognise that she is a sexual being and she knows what this implies. Further, she is usually content to be her age. She is not drawn into the shocking and dangerous sophistication that is seen in man thirteen or fourteen year old girls in the general population. It is generally recognised that a girl’s sexuality is diffuse rather than genitally localised, and the sophistication that I have mentioned is an intense hotting-up of this diffuse sexuality – shown in a precocious preoccupation with make-up, stiletto heels, vulgar ornaments, hysterical shrieking and arch manners. Because of its impact on men and boys this diffuse precocity can plunge the girl suddenly into genital experience – experience for which she is quite unready. Moreover, this condition, once established, seems irremediable. Perhaps other heads have had the experience I have had, of accepting a girl of this age and in this condition, hoping to be able to make a normal and responsible girl of her, but finding that this was not possible; she proves a continuing danger to herself and to boys, and has to leave lest there should be a disastrous result.
It is rare for a girl growing up in a coeducational boarding school from the pre-puberty stage to become like this. And if a girl comes to the school with this sophistication but before puberty, she is likely to drop it and become natural.
Experience in a coeducational boarding school removes many illusions about girls that are still maintained in middle-class society; the illusion, for instance, that they are naturally modest, fastidious and hygienic. (The recent report on the condition of women’s lavatories must have been a shock to those who cherish these illusions!) Those who have believed that women are naturally modest have assumed that no “nice” woman would appear on the stage of the Windmill Theatre, and they must have been bewildered when unquestionably nice young women appeared in bikinis. The truth of the matter is revealed by the fact that if boys and girls have an opportunity to bathe naked, the girls more readily take it – and will do so happily and wholesomely. It is noticeable that the more sophisticated girl, the one who wants to use her sexuality provocatively, is less ready to do without a costume.
I suppose most of us are at least a little shocked when we hear girls using four-letter sexual words. Another illusion gone! But it is no use expressing shock; they may have to work their way through and out of this just as boys do. There is sometimes reason, however, to caution girls about accepting whatever a boy-friend says or does, simply because of the female tendency to respond to whatever the male expects. Boys, with their genitally-centred interests, can sometimes be appallingly obscene – as is shown by notes picked up from waste-paper baskets or dropping out of pockets – and some of them thrust their obscenity mercilessly on girl-friends. This is an instance of a situation in which girls should be encouraged to be independent and to hold their own standards, if they have any. Indeed this is necessary throughout the relationship of the sexes.
The fact that in coeducation we have to recognise that girls share a basic crudity with the other half of their generation should not be any reason for discouragement. It does not make them any less likeable, and it does show what our real material is and our real task. Aren’t we often faced in adult scandals with the challenge to recognise that some young women whose outer appearance seems to be of impeccable good taste, a model of daintiness and hygiene, has been living a sexual life that can only be described as sleazy? One of the most heartening experiences in school life – more obvious in girls because it happens at an earlier age – is to see a girl achieve a real degree of maturity by the age of 18, a maturity in which she is coming to know herself, to accept her “earthiness” with all the rest of her and to make it part of her integrity.
I find that young women keep in touch more than do young men, and they are more open about their intimate experiences. The heartening experience I have described is sometime followed by something even more encouraging: the awareness that they are coping constructively and compassionately with the sexual challenge of the young adult world, meeting the laxities of group life and the urgencies of importunate men, without superiority or prudery, but without losing their own integrity.
It seems to be specially necessary in a coeducational boarding school to establish a relationship with children at an early stage in which all fear and shame about sexual matters are lifted and their interests and needs become clearly apparent. Perhaps it is a result of many year’s experience and of being completely at home in the situation, that I find that after the eleven-year-olds have been in the school a month or two it requires only a few remarks, some of them humorous, to put boys and girls in a fearless condition in which questions simply pour out: all the questions that they have been holding back and imperfectly attempting to answer among themselves. It sometimes takes hours to answer simple questions of fact, so many there are. It has to be recognised that, as a result of the greatly increased publicity about sexual matters, there are now many more items of interest and curiosity in the child’s mind. We must no longer side-step a question about contraception because the child seems too young (though we may restrict the scope of our reply to what he can reasonably take.)
This ease and confidence between adult and child should be maintained as far as possible throughout the latter’s school career, for there may soon come a time when you have to discuss with him or her a boy-girl relationship that is warming up. You will not be much use then if the two regard you as a hostile intruder. You have to get their cooperation and understanding in limiting the degree of sexual expression. You have to be both compassionate and honest; it is useless to act merely with authority, even though at critical moments authority may sometimes be necessary. The two must be able to feel that you are made of the same sexual stuff as they are, and that you can see into their problem precisely for that reason. The question of trust sometimes comes acutely into the situation. I am asked, with evident pain on the face of the questioner, “Don’t you trust us?”. Usually I have to reply: “I trust you just as much as I would trust myself, and that’s not very far!” This is not wriggling out; it is the plain truth: that for all of us the avoidance of what may prove disastrous depends upon stopping before we reach the steep slope where the skis inevitably take charge of us. Young people usually have too much self-confidence – girls especially, for their bodies do not warn them as soon as does a boy’s. I often quote Dr. Marion Hilliard in saying to a girl that “her best defence is to have no confidence at all in her ability to say nay at the appropriate moment.”
All this has definite implications concerning the size and organisation of the educational boarding schools. Either the school must be small enough for the head (or responsible person) to know the boys and girls and to be accepted as them as a guide, or it must be socially subdivided so that there are responsible married adults in contact with groups of manageable size. I would not like coeducational boarding school to grow amorphously to a size where contrivances, subtle “management” or extensive prohibitions have to take the place of personal contact and guidance. Where coeducation ceases to demand and provide opportunity for the personal approach to personal problems there is little value left in it. The fundamental justification for coeducation is that it can provide the better conditions for the deepening of everything that is intimate and personal.
This should not, however, be taken to imply that our work in this intimate aspect of education can be carried out behind a door that is slammed on the world. We cannot afford to neglect forces that operate on the mass, on every single one of us. This would again be to make the mistake of the idealist, expecting that if you induce the acceptance of the “right” standards and ideals in your pupils all will be well. We have to assess and direct all our efforts in full awareness of the cultural matrix in which we all move. We must dig out, recognise and criticise the hidden assumptions of our particular society. The characteristics and differenced of the sexes as we see them are to often taken as absolute. In the unconscious there operate not only the archetypal forces that are the common inheritance of mankind everywhere, but also the habits and assumptions taken in increasingly and imperceptibly from our particular society.
In spite of the supposed emancipation of women during this century, the world still shows to an extreme degree a condition of neurotic unbalance between the influence of the sexes. Ours is still a man-dominated world and its dangers are a reflection of this domination, for the result is endless and almost uncontrollable aggression in the service of ideologies or of personal power. It is into this world that woman has been “liberated”, a world that offers her authority and significance only in so far as she imitates men in their neurotic folly. It is not a world in which a woman can be easily herself, make her own womanly contribution to society. A bogus equality has thrown her into a frightening insecurity and she reacts with hysterical femininity. Is there any other explanation of the enormous development and exploitation of woman’s narcissism, in that no popular magazine can survive if it does not primarily pander to this? Is there any other explanation for the way women still panic about the need to have a man even when there is a growing excess of men? They are simply not given a chance to discover their own independent significance.
This is a state of affairs the coeducational boarding school can do something about, and I suggest that the records of these schools already show a large measure of success in giving girls this sense of their own significance. It has been my policy to fight a continuous battle over this. A battle it has to be, for there is something in the primitive nature of women that resists the very development that is necessary for their fulfilment as human beings. This primitive element is what makes a woman accept a beating from a man because she “loves” him – when it would be better to wring his neck. It is responsible for the cynical belief that a woman is like water; she takes the shape of any vessel she is poured into. I see no more reason to accept this primitiveness in women than to accept the male primitiveness that makes a man into an aggressive lunatic the moment he becomes a political leader in power.
Because we are human we can be expected to transcend our primitiveness. I think we have to fight femininity in the interest of womanliness. I do not think that teenagers should be merely allowed to do what they want in the wish-fulfilment belief that they will eventually emerge into maturity. It is not an admirable, or tolerable characteristic of girls that they should submerge their personality under a sea of permanent waves of hide it behind a curtain of hair – just because it is the fashion. I do not suggest that we should compel girls to adopt a pattern of appearance and conduct prescribed by us adults, but that we should frequently challenge girls to stop being slaves, to discover and be themselves. It must be recognised also that we are not only challenging something primitive, but also the vast organisation of industry designed to foster and exploit it. I see no more reason to give in to the cynical greed of the bra, girdle, cosmetic and shoe manufacturers than to the evil activities of the armament manufacturer who encourage the destructive impulses of men.
It should be possible for us to combat the moronic femininity I have described without giving girls the impression that we are seeking to “unsex them” – and we are the better able to make this clear in a coeducational school, especially if we are seen wholeheartedly to accept sexuality as a part of mankind’s richest endowment. We are not seeking to deprive girls of their sexuality, but to take it from the trivial to the deep, to make it individual and personal rather than mass-produced.
These thoughts lead me to return to the point touched upon earlier concerning the adjustment of sex-education to what we expect to be our pupil’s future experience. What place should we give to “morality” in this education?
In recent years many voices have been heard questioning the value of the conventional moral approach. The Quaker pamphlet, its support by social workers and by some distinguished Anglican clergy, the Bishop of Woolwich’s criticism of “packaged morality”, similar statements by Anglican writers in Cambridge, the Reith lectures by Professor Carstairs, and the even more daring broadcasts by Alex Comfort.
There has been open defiance of conventional morality in earlier generations – but usually by avant-garde intellectuals, who wanted some kind of imagined freedom, and their experiments – precisely because they stemmed from ideas – took little account of the realities of human life and tended only to make a mess. The protest of our time comes from people whose own lives are largely satisfactory, who are not asking for any increased “freedom” for themselves, but whose wide experience of human bewilderment and suffering convinces them that the primary insistence on morality side-steps the real problem of human fulfilment and happiness. Those among them who are Christians do not think of God as a law-maker, but as the source of tenderness, compassion, responsibility. Morals are human attempts to control people in the mass, not therefore to be abrogated or despised, but at least made open to criticism and revision in the light of particular needs and experience; in fact, morals are made for man, not man for morals. Or as Bishop Robinson put it, when reflecting on the particularity of actual situations, “......persons matter, and the deepest welfare of these particular persons in this particular situation matters, more than anything else in the world”, and elsewhere “...... there can for the Christian be no “packaged” moral judgments – for persons are more important than “standards”.
There are important implications of this new approach in our overt sex-education and in what we express by our relationship in school. I have already criticised the idealist approach as liable to produce brittle people who collapse when face with the unexpectedness of reality, or who stick to their ideas or ideals so that the bewildered partner begins to feel married not to a person but a prayer-book. Almost any picture we present to our pupils of life as we should like it to be for them can be associated with this danger. We can avoid this only by a patent “acceptance” of life as we meet it in the school. The kind of idealist I have criticised does not accept life as it is but continually implies by his thought and conduct that he wishes that life were different, that so to speak, he had a more orderly and manageable “workshop”. The typical moralist implies that children ought to be different from what they are, that the school is always an unsatisfactory place that would be more enjoyable if it were more orderly, the children better behaved, everything approximating more nearly to a desirable pattern.
The best pattern of sex-relationship or marriage, if presented with this attitude, will give little help to our pupils. But it will be transformed in its appeal if it is seen as something achieved right in the middle of the rough-and-tumble of life, created from it and without repudiating it.
At the time of writing I am having to deal with a problem of two sixth formers – boy and girl – who have established a rapidly warming up relationship that leads them to break rules right and left (e.g. about bedtimes). They are both thoroughly good people, appreciative, intelligent, devoted to the school. As they themselves admit, when they are together in the evenings all other considerations are swept aside; they become irresponsible. They make no excuses. I could express moral shock at this contradiction in their conduct. But I don’t; I’ve got to work from within the situation, not from outside it. Behind my immediate thoughts is the awareness, sharpened by the research carried out during the activities of the Quaker Committee – what this is precisely the problem of adult life. Unexpected and unintended sexual encounters break into the lives of even the most responsible people and set them adrift for a while on uncharted sea. That this is not widely recognised is due to the fact that such problems are sometimes lovingly and constructively resolved without any publicity, or the marriage, because it has to be maintained, jogs along reasonably well, or the stronger partner, through sheer generosity of spirit, is able to accept the aberrations of the other. We ought to be glad, not sorry, that in a coeducational school the situation can arise, if only in miniature, that challenges the partners to deal constructively with this disconcerting discovery about their own nature.
There are times when we are bound to be exasperated by teenagers, to lose our tempers, even to be fierce in judgment. These things can happen without harm and perhaps even with good result, provided the teenager are not thereby shut out from us, made to feel the mere objects of moralising.
I have emphasised the unexpectedness of much sexual experience, and we must hold this in mind in everything we do to prepare our pupils. If I try to put a picture of marriage before them it will probably be that of a marriage between equals, between two independent people who before marriage have achieved a maturity of their own and who after marriage retain the kind of equal-sized independence that lends continued interest to the relationship and the possibility of endless discoveries. I shall want them to be equally intelligent or, if not, at least equally respecting each other’s valuations and judgment. I shall probably say that they should have a joint bank account with equal responsibility for signing cheques! Perhaps a pupil will take me seriously enough to say that he or she will be determined to find a partner with whom such a marriage will be possible.
But it remains true that marriage is to some extent a lottery. The impulses that drive people into love and the decision to marry are often irrational. So the erstwhile pupil finds himself not with the woman he dreamed of marrying, but a real woman who doesn’t fit any dream. The two together have to build a marriage sensitively and tolerantly on what is in fact possible between them, not on what ought to be possible. Some principles may still be important, but persons come before principles.
We may tell our pupils that it is good to avoid pre-marital intercourse, and find excellent reasons for saying this. But we know perfectly well that many of them will not be able to maintain such continence and not necessarily through any “fault” that we can discern. Accident and circumstances may prove more powerful than the strongest of intentions. The quality of our preparation of such pupils may make the difference between pre-marital intercourse that is a mere trivial aberration, cheapening their sexuality, and an encounter which, though outside the code, is personal and enriching. I always find that there are some people who are enraged by the suggestion that an encounter outside the conventional code can be enriching. I have little patience with them. They refuse to face facts because they are afraid they may be true. They are our modern Pharisees.
No matter how wise our preparation, some of our pupils will make marriages that are so unsatisfactory that divorce is the inevitable end. Are these to be thought of merely as failures? If our only aims to get pupils safely and permanently married, they are. But an education that is entirely directed towards the hope of success is a misdirected education. Most people experience more failure than success, and an adequate education should help them to assimilate failure, to assimilate their own mistakes and disasters. In other words it should enable life to be redemptive. Redemption does not mean learning from mistakes in order to achieve ultimate success, but taking mistakes in order to achieve ultimate success, but taking mistakes and failure humbly into ourselves so that we are deepened and sensitised by them. There is a great difference between a divorce that occurs between people acting in this way and one in which there is only bitterness and despair.
It should be evident that our primary aim should be to encourage in our pupils the development of resilience and compassion, and a fundamentally creative attitude towards difficulty.
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It may be observed that I have said much more about sex and coeducation in relation to girls than boys. This is because the sexual problem in boys and men remains much as it has always been, whereas in girls and women we have an emerging problem that insistently clamours for attention. It may be true that the future of mankind depends more on the education of girls and on what we expect of women than upon anything else. For women to achieve her proper place in the world’s affairs – a place that need not sacrifice one iota of her womanliness – might be radically to transform the possibilities before mankind, to open up a new era of creative development.
But even if this is accepted, the attitude and education of the boy is just as important as that of the girl, precisely because the girl cannot “become” unless the boy equally “becomes” in the relationship. It has been traditionally accepted that the male takes what he can get of sexual experience. The continuation of this tradition is incompatible with what we hope for in the development of girls. I am glad when girls from my school show that they know how to deal with the irresponsible male for whom taking a girl to bed is as casual as lighting a cigarette. But it is a severe criticism of our world and of the education of boys that girls should so often have to face this problem – an uncreative and defensive situation. I think we can claim that boys in a coeducational boarding school become more imaginative about the nature and needs of girls and women, more aware of what they are doing in a relationship, more responsible for the partner as a person and not likely to treat her as a receptacle.
With the emancipation of women there is the danger that the less fastidious woman, seeing apparently unlimited freedom ahead of her, will take the right to sexual experience just as men have taken it. This kind of equality will only intensify an evil, and the suicidal attempts of certain young women whose adventures have recently come before the public eye may be the extreme manifestation of an emptiness that a doubled evil is producing.
Kenneth Barnes March, 1965.
Archive reference PP/KCB 6/6/4 document 08