Education: Books v. Tunnel

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Three summers ago a group of eleven serious thinkers—among them, Robert S. Lynd (Middletown) and Margaret Mead (Sex & Temperament)—dismayed by the insecurity, the bewilderment, the crimes of the younger generation, gathered at Hanover, N. H., under the sponsorship of the General Education Board to consider what needed to be done to restore reason and balance to modern juvenile life. They had learned that to the usual perplexities of adolescents in all times there had been added since the War new worries accompanying profound changes in the structure and tempo of society.

Because the "turbulent younger generation" was "either surprisingly ignorant or surprisingly well versed in things that aren't so," the Hanover conferees agreed something must be done, turned over their sombre data to a Commission on Human Relations subsequently set up by the Progressive Education Association and financed by the Rockefeller General Education Board, to provide for Youth, parents and teachers the facts of modern life that they needed to solve contemporary problems. This sizable order was undertaken by a group of educators, writers and scientists who prepared a series of nine books with such titles as Society & Family Living, Do Adolescents Need Parents?, Literature & Human Relations and last spring the commission began sending six of the nine to 100 U. S. high schools and colleges. Last week the commission ran into its first public opposition.

One of the problems which the "Hanover group" believed to be most perplexing to young folk was Sex. This generation of parents, the conferees believed, is too busy or too puzzled to give adequate answers to its children's sex questions. U. S. high schools, the Commission on Human Relations later found, which receive Youth at the age when the sex problem is most insistent, have made slight progress in the past 17 years toward providing this information. In a survey by the U. S. Public Health Service and American Social Hygiene Association in 1920, only 8% of the nation's high schools reported they gave coordinated sex instruction; eight years later only 10% did so. The commission, ten years after, convinced that the missing information had not yet been supplied, declared: ". . . If. as is held in some quarters, high-school youngsters are learning all they ought to know about sex in their biology and hygiene courses, their questions certainly do not show it."

The commission's book which was provided to clear up U. S. juveniles' ignorance about sex problems is Dr. Alice Virginia Keliher's Life & Growth. It begins with a discussion of inferiority complexes, goes on to dispel adolescents' fears of abnormality, and culminates with two chapters called "From Child to Man" and "Growing Pains," which treat the physiology of procreation with great candor. It was these that sent Philadelphia public school officials running for cover last week.