Homework

I am a teacher. If homework is so awful, how is it that some of my students ask for it?

I have no objection to homework when it is asked for by pupils. Of course not.

If one of my pupils asks me to give her a few geometri­cal problems to solve in the evening, I am happy about it. What I object to is the many hours’ grind at night foisted on school children in subjects in which they have no in­trinsic interest. The proof of the pudding is that in almost every school there would be rejoicing if homework were abolished.

My girl of 11 won’t do her homework and is failing-in school. If she is put in the same class next term, she is going to be very unhappy. Shall I push her to study or shall I let her fail?

Woman, you cannot push her.

She already knows the consequences and has made her choice. Your child is alive and shows a healthy criticism of the system by refusing to take part in it.

How can you as an individual remedy a situation in which your daughter is the victim of a barbarous system? What good did homework ever do anyone? Home study-forced on a child—is dead study. Such forced study wrenches the child away from her play hours. Homework is resented because it has no true place in your daughter’s sense of living.

It occurs to me: Maybe your daughter is not much of a scholar. Maybe her natural interests do not gravitate towards study. Must you force your values and ambitions on her? Far better for her to be a happy human being with­out a college degree, than an unhappy neurotic girl fighting her inner drives and armed only with a college diploma.

Sex

Sex education

How should one handle the sex question?

There are but two ways to handle the sex question. One is the moral or religious way: sex is sinful, wrong, dirty. The other way is to be realistic about it.

Sex instruction in a school must be a pale affair; the parents would never stand for a lesson that told of the emo­tional part of sex, or for a lecture that spoke plainly of the bliss of sexual intercourse. It is ordained that the schools treat only the barest facts of physiology. Personally, if sex is to be taught in this listless manner, I don’t see the point about teaching sex at all.

From the safety angle, a girl has only to learn that intercourse without contraceptives can lead to pregnancy; and both sexes should be told again and again that venereal disease is real and dangerous. In a good society there would be no need to have any sex instruction at all; the subject would arise freely and naturally before adolescence in the home rearing, and would be handled by the parents freely and naturally.

I do not think the adolescent should be told too much about the technique of love-making; one of the delights of sex is the discovery of those techniques.

Most children get their sex information from other children; most of the information obtained in this way is distorted, pornographic, and sadistic. As a result, far too many a honeymoon is an experience in rape, and far too many married women have had a horror of sex since their first night.