the population to-day, while in the home-life there is every
opportunity for coarse familiarity with sexual matters, there is
no opportunity for a pure and enlightened introduction to them,
parents being for the most part both morally and intellectually
incapable of aiding their children here. That the school should
assume the leading part in this task is, she believes, in
accordance with the whole tendency of modern civilized life. She
would have the instruction graduated in such a manner that during
the fifth or sixth year of school life the pupil would receive
instruction, with the aid of diagrams, concerning the sexual
organs and functions of the higher mammals, the bull and cow
being selected by preference. The facts of gestation would of
course be included. When this stage was reached it would be easy
to pass on to the human species with the statement: "Just in the
same way as the calf develops in the cow so the child develops in
the mother's body."

It is difficult not to recognize the force of Maria Lischnewska's
argument, and it seems highly probable that, as she asserts, the
instruction proposed lies in the course of our present path of
progress. Such instruction would be formal, unemotional, and
impersonal; it would be given not as specific instruction in
matters of sex, but simply as a part of natural history. It would
supplement, so far as mere knowledge is concerned, the
information the child had already received from its mother. But
it would by no means supplant or replace the personal and
intimate relationship of confidence between mother and child.
That is always to be aimed at, and though it may not be possible
among the ill-educated masses of to-day, nothing else will
adequately take its place.