Sex Education

Back in President Eliot's time, the proposal of a course in sex education, marriage, and mental hygiene would have been greeted by a shocked silence. To any Victorian, these topics were private matters, and not part of a liberal education.

But times have changed, and fortunately, educational practices have moved along with them. Scores of colleges now offer courses or lectures in sex and marriage. At Dartmouth, a required course for Freshmen discusses the human body, reproduction, heredity, and marriage. Swarthmore surveys the field in a biology course. Many others, follow Michigan's plan of a voluntary sociology program in marriage counsel, birth and disease control. The College should sponsor such a course, also.

After all, just because a man has a Harvard education, he has no inherent gifts that enable him to negotiate sex and marriage on instinct alone.

In secondary school, the subject was hardly brushed over. Like most people, he probably picked up most of his information in faulty fragments from his peers.

Nor can he do much better here. The University has a three-man staff of phychiatrists, who can give personal advice if necessary. But these men are much to busy with neuroses and psychoses to dispense information to large numbers of students on such a mundane topic as raising a family.

A course, then, is needed. It would not be compulsory, since there are bound to be some with an adequate background, and others with a positive contempt for these topics. We suggest an upper-group Natural Sciences course with course credit but not distribution credit. The exact curriculum is better left to the doctors assigned to teach it. They can draw on many successful prototypes in other schools. The course should start soon, for there is as much need for sex hygiene and marriage counseling as for any other area of knowledge.