ABSTRACT

Sexuality of any kind in the schools is a touchy issue. Such concern is inevitable because the school is second only to the family unit in influencing the way children view the world. Parents’ anxiety about childhood sexuality has in the past led many of them to join with hysterical political efforts to abolish all sex education in the schools. In England, the public schools, which were private boarding schools dating from the late medieval period, continued the tradition of sex segregation and coupled it with isolating the young boys from their families and from contact with females. The leader of the reform in the English public-school system was Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby from 1828 to 1842. Homosexuality among schoolteachers might well be declining because proportionately fewer of the women will be homosexuals as other opportunities open up to women and as the teaching profession permits married women teachers.