Article for Marriage Guidance Council on Prep. For Marriage in a co-ed school
Date unknown
A school that concerns itself with this matter has two things to do - to impart information and to encourage certain attitudes. These are not wholly distinct tasks, because the context in which the facts are presented, and the manner, have much to do with the development of attitudes.
Are we well past the stage when it was thought that biological information alone was sufficient? Perhaps; but it does not seem very long ago - twenty years? –hwen (sic) a conference showed that even the facts stopped short, that many girls’ schools could not get beyond the frog or boys’ schools beyond the rabbit. My work for the last twenty-five years has been in coeducational boarding schools and in the last fifteen in a school of my own making. The latter fact should not lead anyone to suppose that one can set the stage exactly as one would like it to be. The outer world is present in every school, as indeed it should be. I have worked always with mixed groups and found no difficulty in discussing with them any aspect or detail of sexual life about which they appeared to need information. Much of the material of the material of discussions is to be found in a book written by my wife and myself in 1938, though the presentation varies form time to time and some of the physiology is in need of correction.
In the Sixth Form I find that boys and girls are ready to take anything and there is little likelihood of any of the things we talk about being too “advanced” for them, though of course the significance of what we say cannot be fully understood until they have had supporting experience. Many of them will have read Grahame Green’s novels and those of D.H, Lawrence, perhaps Joyce’s Ullyses and the Decameron. Many of them will have read certain of Donne’s Elegies with amusement and delight. Penguins such as Psychology of Sex will appear on their bookshelves. The whole field of sexual experience is open before them, at least in imagination and the details of sexual contact will have been brought before them, some of them pleasant, some repu[l]sive or frigh[tening,] all of them intriguing. Many of them - especially girls - skip over the detail that they do not understand, but they derive impressions which add up to a sum total of attitudes. It is well therefore, that we should put “everything on the table” so that no anxieties or fears are left hidden.
It will, perhaps always be necessary to emphasise the full equality of men and women in the enjoyment of their sex life, for the urgency and aggressiveness of the male will always tend to produce a situation in which the woman remains unsatisfied. In view of the hpahazard (sic) and often distorted way in which matters are discussed between young people, it is important we should say exactly what we mean by this, in terms of orgasm. It is just when we come to some physical detail of this sort that attitudes and facts intermingle and one has an opportunity to emphasise the need for tenderness (love is such an overworked word) and understanding in sex life. It has to be remembered that in spite of modern enlightenment, there are very strong influences at work - witness the station bookstalls - calculated to make women appear to be a creature who provokes lust, making sexual activity in the man explosive and aggressive rather than human and tender.
In a coeducational boarding school there are many opportunities, throughout the age-range, to help in the building up of sound attitudes. However remote a community may be, the dissociation between the personal and the sexual, so characteristic of the world at large, is always here to be fought. The “dirty minded” small boys who jeer at or make innuendoes about a boy-and-girl friendship provide, I suppose, the most obvious example. One has to keep close to these boys, to help them to arrive at a point where they can see that sex, far from being something taken out of its personal setting, is a bridge that makes possible the deepest personal intimacy, that indeed that is what it is for.
The problem of sex education and education is primarily thet (sic) problem of understanding what a personal relationship can be, what depth and richness it can achieve. Information about sex achieves its true significance and genuine practical value when it fits into the pattern of this understanding. There are many young people in all classes of society who have never known real tenderness and to whom intimacy is a meaningless or completely misunderstood word. Sex information thus has no good personal experience to which it can be associated. For all young people, but especially for these, preparation for marriage is primarily a matter of general education, education that is a nourishment of the personality through contact with others who have deep experiences and clear feelings. Personal relationship and quality of feeling come before instruction.
We should at all times be certain what are the [xxxxxxn] essentials. Preparation for marriage should not be a preparation for the acceptance of a conventional moral code or the bolstering up of marriage as an institution. It should go far deeper, so that in sex experience and partnership there is a revelation of what is possible in life at its richest. Our prpeparation (sic) should not rest on the assumption that it will, or should, guide all young people painlessly into marriage, for this would have the result that those who do not go the way we have planned for them, who through wilfulness, adventurousness or even generosity, step aside, would put themselves beyond our help. All our education in school is far too much education for success; the child who fails to pass his examinations does not know what to do with his failure. We need far more education for failure, education that will stand people in good stead when what they expect does not happen, when they fall from grace, when they deliberately chose a path other than the one their teachers wanted them to take.
It is difficult to tell whether pre-marital and extra-marital sex experience is greater now than formerly. We do know that it is considerable and more unashamed. If we criticise it, it is important that we should know precisely why we do so. Purely from the point of view of what the persons concerned bring to it, it may be less open to criticism than much of what happens within marriage - since within this there can be the worst cruelty. The etymological meaning of morality is custom, but what we call true morality is concerned with the way people treat each other, with what they bring inwardly to their relationship whether within marriage or outside it. There are many young people today who do not see why they should wait for for marriage, but their relationships may nevertheless be fully responsible in a personal sense. At the other extreme there is a good deal of loveless copulation, a mere experimenting, a hedonistic exploitation of sensation. In between these there can be every degree of commitment or non-commitment, of seriousness or levity. Ill-prepared young people are caught in a net, hardly knowing what is happening to them suffer bw (sic) bewilderment and pain. A large proportion of marriages will be marriages of people who have been through such experience and it is therefore most important that they should not feel that we have ceased to be with them. What we have given them should have helped them even in their unconventionality and certainly in any suffering. Some marriages will fail and divorce will result. Here again it is most important that wisdom should be built on failure. No human situation is irredeemable and it is not unlikely that that some of the wayward ones, especially those who consciously suffer, will bring more wisdom to marriage than those who tread a safer path.
Everything that is Pharisaical must be expunged from our approach to problems of sex and marriage, we need humility and the deepest compassion for our fellows, whatever their experience, and that compassion should be evident in our teaching if that teaching is to go with our pupils whatever their experience. Our whole environment is changing, now more rapidly than ever. Patterns of conduct will change with it, inevitably, but if we have faith this process will not frighten us. There are certain unchanging truths, and values, which are distinct from habits of t[h]ought or tradition, which are simple and few. The best we can do to help the young is to assist them to discover what these are - if we know ourselves.
I have emphasised the general qualities that are required rather than details of instruction. Given these qualities, and fearlessness on the part of the teacher there will be no lack of material in school life or curriculum. I should say, however, as a practical matter, that I cannot imagine how the work can be properly and fully done unless one has both sexes present. As a science teacher I believe in practical work as well as “chalk and talk” - though of course I do not allow my pupils to blow themselves up. To have both boys and girls present is to give reality to on’e teaching about sex, to make a unity of theory and practise. Even in the first tentative love affairs of boys and girls, the principles are applicable. Where there is a fearless relationship between the young people and the adult the opportunities for a deepening understanding are great.
Further, a mixed group of Sixth-Formers provides fascinating opportunities for the discussion of problems of family life that are not primarily sexual, especially the bringing up of children. There is a significant difference in the way they discuss such things if both sexes are present - a greater sincerity and objectivity.
Archive reference PP/KCB 6/6/2 document 04