Use indirect means—athletics, social affairs, literature, religion, and a lifework—to redirect the youth's instinctive energies alongside direct sex instruction.¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 4 claims (3 for, 1 against) · 2 studies (1 review, 1 theoretical), q1 · 0 of 2 report an effect size · 4 claims rest on one study

Description¶

Beyond instruction in a narrow sense, the essay recommends filling the adolescent's life with absorbing activities and purposes. It lists "Interest and participation in athletics and social affairs, in literature, poetry, language, religion, and so on, the filling of the youth's mind with a lifework" as means that help, in the terms of Hall, Jones and Cabot, to long-circuit instinctive tendencies, sublimate desires, and transform vital energy. These indirect means supplement, not replace, direct instruction.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Availability of engaging alternatives—athletics, social affairs, literature, religion—and a lifework toward which the youth's energies can be directed.

Constraints¶

• The essay presents these means as serving indirectly for the regulation of the sexual life, not as a substitute for direct instruction.

Target Learners¶

• adolescents

Target Learning Goals¶

• healthy regulation of the sexual life
• sublimation of instinctive tendencies into socially valued pursuits

Claims¶

• Instruction in sexual matters is held by authorities to be the best and most powerful means of prevention, though not a cure-all, and the alternative to good instruction is bad instruction rather than silence. [+W]
• Imparting simple facts of sex is insufficient; instruction must be given in a vital, dynamic way by teachers who understand childhood and youth [+W]
• The instructor's personality and attitudes influence outcomes of sex instruction as much as the facts taught, so personal appeal should carry greater stress than information alone. [+W]
• An indirect, gradual nature-study approach to sex instruction is superfluous and may arouse pupils' suspicions rather than disarm them [-W]

Related Strategies¶

• Outline a half-year 'Social Problems' course distributed in bi-weekly sessions over the four high school years, moving from basic facts to social aspects and eugenics
• Arouse desired emotions in pupils through art, literature, history, and imitation of admired models

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Foster, W. S. (1911). School Instruction in Matters of Sex. Journal of Educational Psychology. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22School+Instruction+in+Matters+of+Sex%22+Foster