ABSTRACT
One of the firmest beliefs of parents, law-givers, and teachers in many nursery schools is that children should be preserved from all contact with crude fact and should have everything presented to them in a pretty-pretty, fanciful form. I know women who teach music to young children and instead of giving the notes their proper names, they call a crotchet ‘ta’, a quaver ‘teh’, and a semi-quaver ‘ta-teh’. They have a notion that these names are more attractive to the young, though, so far as I have observed, this belief is wholly unfounded. Modern children’s stories suffer from an analogous defect: they do not present a realm of fancy as such but give an air of silliness to what they pretend is real. In graver matters, there is the same error: historical characters are portrayed as wholly virtuous unless they are recognised villains. It is not thought good for the young to know that great men have their weaknesses or that great causes have always had their bad sides. Sex instruction for the young is frequently advocated, but hardly any one advocates straightforward truthfulness about the emotional and social aspects of sex. Children are taught what the flowers do and what the bees do and what men and women (according to the conventional code) ought to do. They are given no hint that, while the flowers and bees really do what they are supposed to do, men and women as a rule do not. In spite of the reaction against Victorian prudery, hardly any one sees any harm in this form of lying.
