an educator in the
narrower sense her functions will, in most cases, end at or before
puberty. A somewhat more technical and completely impersonal acquaintance
with the essential facts of sex then becomes desirable, and this would
usually be supplied by the school.

The great though capricious educator, Basedow, to some extent a
pupil of Rousseau, was an early pioneer in both the theory and
the practice of giving school children instruction in the facts
of the sexual life, from the age of ten onwards. He insists much
on this subject in his great treatise, the _Elementarwerk_
(1770-1774). The questions of children are to be answered
truthfully, he states, and they must be taught never to jest at
anything so sacred and serious as the sexual relations. They are
to be shown pictures of childbirth, and the dangers of sexual
irregularities are to be clearly expounded to them at the outset.
Boys are to be taken to hospitals to see the results of venereal
disease. Basedow is aware that many parents and teachers will be
shocked at his insistence on these things in his books and in his
practical pedagogic work, but such people, he declares, ought to
be shocked at the Bible (see, e.g., Pinloche, _La Reforme de
l'Education en Allemagne au dixhuitieme siecle: Basedow et le
Philanthropinisme_, pp. 125, 256, 260, 272). Basedow was too far
ahead of his own time, and even of ours, to exert much influence
in this matter, and he had few immediate imitators.

Somewhat later than Basedow, a distinguished English physician,
Thomas Beddoes, worked on somewhat the same lines, seeking to
promote sexual knowledge by lectures and demonstrations. In his
remarkable book, _Hygeia_, published in 1802 (vol. i, Essay IV)
he sets forth the absurdity of the conventional requirement that
"discretion and ignorance should lodge in the same bosom," and
deals at length with the question of masturbation and the need of
sexual education. He insists on the great importance of lectures
on natural history which, he had found, could be given with
perfect propriety to a mixed audience. His experiences had shown
that botany, the amphibia, the hen and her eggs, human anatomy,
even disease and sometimes the sight of it, are salutary from
this point of view. He thinks it is a happy thing for a child to
gain his first knowledge of sexual