body and functions, in however elementary a fashion, she will have
initiated him both in sexual knowledge and in sexual hygiene.

The mother who establishes a relationship of confidence with her child
during these first years will probably, if she possesses any measure of
wisdom and tact, be able to preserve it even after the epoch of puberty
into the difficult years of adolescence. But as 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 Rèforme de
l'Education en Allemagne au dixhuitième siècle: 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