p. 8 | Love Affairs in Schools

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 5, 1911

Love Affairs in Schools

“THIS magazine,” says Edward W. Bok, writing in the Ladies’ Home Journal for October, “is in constant receipt of letters from school-teachers and principals, asking if some word can not be written to awaken parents to even a partial realization of the appalling conditions that exist among the pupils of their schools, especially of those schools which boys and girls attend, and of which the parents are in absolute ignorance. These teachers feel their helplessness, in that their authority is limited to the time in which the children are at school.

“Every teacher lays emphasis on the universal commonness of love affairs between pupils, of which the parents are absolutely ignorant. The preoccupation of these young people with each other is often so great as to interfere seriously with school duties, and the parents wonder why their children’s study averages are so low. These lovers, say the teachers, go to and from school together, and have still better opportunity for intercourse if they travel, as so many do, by train or by trolley-car. Clandestine interviews are arranged far enough away from the school to escape its authority. Social clubs and so-called literary and dramatic societies, of which both sexes are members, are popular because of the facilities they afford for intercourse. Social affairs at places other than at the school are arranged at school, and permitted by unsuspecting parents. Picnics, expeditions for gathering botanical specimens or nuts or leaves, are arranged under the guise of ‘nature study.’ The parents never think of asking whether these excursions into the woods are chaperoned, or, if so, if they are adequately chaperoned. Children are allowed to go to other children’s houses when the mother is not present; they are permitted to stop on the way from school at ostensibly protected places; and in seemingly a hundred or more ways the ingenuity of the young is taxed to the utmost to secure unchaperoned intercourse between the sexes, with resultant conditions, as all those teachers are unanimous in saying, that would be appalling to hundreds of so-called careful parents.

“It is difficult to see just what more this magazine can say on this subject than it has said, although none so well as this magazine recognizes the need of the right word. It has repeatedly warned parents of the existence of these and similar conditions, of which their children are a part; but the rejoinder has invariably come back: ‘That may be true of other children, but not of ours. We know our children, and naturally you can not and do not.’ Before such blind faith the weightiest argument falls. Now and then a horrible exposure of conditions among school-children comes to the surface, and the heads of parents are bowed in shame and humiliation. But even then it never occurs to the parents who read and hear, and whose children happen not to be directly concerned, to consider whether their own children may not be involved in similar conditions. It has, perhaps, been brought home to no other magazine as it has to this periodical—the pitiful and criminal ignorance which exists to-day among parents as to the appalling practises that are going on of which their children are a part. The facts can not be printed: that is impossible. The teachers acknowledge that they dare not speak; for where they have done so, they have either met with rebuff from the parents, censure from their superiors, or have lost their positions. The average mother is fully content to believe that all is right with her children, however much may be wrong with other mothers’ children. And there the matter stands—with our duty, as we see it at least, fully discharged, so far as it lies within our limitations. The solution lies with each individual parent. The teacher stands helpless before unmentionable conditions.”